From Analog to Digital Holography, a Personal Holographic Journey
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Smith, Steven L.
Starting in 1978 until culmination in research with the Spatial Imaging group at MIT in 2004, a Personal Holography Journey details Artistic and Commercial work produced by Steven L. Smith. In the Late 1970’s, advances in holographic films and processing techniques made possible a second wave of artistic and commercial holography. These techniques leveraged the start of the professional holographic imaging studio, The Lasersmith Inc. In house research advanced holographic imaging into new areas of commercial and artistic development. Starting with controlled color reflection holograms, (Pseudo-Color reflection technique), the development of a real time capture system for embossed stereograms and finishing with research that realized a full color full parallax holographic printer at MIT, this paper details aspects of each of the critical technologies that were developed and commercialized along the way.
 Well good afternoon and thank you TJ and Dr. Fan for the invitation to come here to China. It's my first visit to China and it's actually kind of nice to have it be kind of like a homecoming. So many of my friends are here. We've come over as well as many as new friends that I have the opportunity to meet. So again, thank you so much. So this is going to be a 10-minute description of my first 20 years in holography. I'm going to go through the description of the video. Because it turns out that between 1979 and 2004, a significant number of advances in technologies made themselves available to people working in the holographic medium. So I want to give you a little bit of my background. In 1979, I was the manager of a professional photo lab. I spent my days basically color balancing prints to transparencies. And I spent my nights running around with a view camera photographing Chicago because I was really interested in becoming an art photographer doing landscape photography in those days. So basically I had a very astute background in advanced color printing and dye transfer work. But also at the same time I had run into a small hologram that thank you TJ for showing at the beginning of this section that little hologram of the car in playing back with laser light is the very first hologram that I saw at a museum and not actually a museum, but the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. And that had an impact on me not so much because it was a three-dimensional object, but because I was looking at red light. I was looking at an objects light that was really photons coming off of the film. So between 1979 and 1981, I spent my summers attending holography workshops with TJ who was bringing basically what has turned out to be the luminaries of holography over those years as guest lecturers in interferometry and color holography. And so that was my exposure to beginning holography, advanced imaging techniques. And additionally as the years went on, I also had the opportunity to be a guest lecturer at those workshops for photoresist and embossed holography. In 1980, I had the fortune of meeting another gentleman in holography, Tom Speckovich. We were both at a club, both trying to talk to the same girl who eventually introduced us to each other, saying, does this other guy that's talking to me about the same stuff as you, you should meet him. So that's how I met Tom. So in 1980, we started working on starting a holography group, the Chicago Holographic Cooperative. And out of that came Smith and Speckovich Holography. Our skill sets were about the process of making single and multiple color reflection holograms, multi-color rainbow holograms, reflection color holograms that are contact copy with a contact copy system. And then eventually led to a 36 camera real time capture system, as well as all of the embossed imaging technologies like 2D, 3D, full color 2D, RGB stereograms, in other words, full color stereograms with real life. So that first period of time was pretty extensive. But what launched it was in 1982. There was an improvement with the denisuke process. Pyrogalal developer and re-halogenating bleach had been a paper published a year before by Walter Spearing's. There were two papers that were published in 1982 at the first international conference on holography by Lon Moore and John Kaufman, which basically introduced the concept of using TEA, which is triethanolamine, as a pre-swelling technique. And Tom and I also had access to Zenith TV's research labs. We were working with them making HOEs for projection television systems. But because we had a key to the door, that meant we could come in at night and use their great set of tools by looking at phosphors on TV tubes and mapping the spectrum and look at our holograms and get some really good analytical data. So that helped in that first year. In 1984, I produced a small piece of one of my few art pieces, but I got to remember at the beginning of this, I was an art photographer looking for a way to subsidize my equipment. So this was a full color reflection piece that was done on Agfa film with GP62 and the P-benzo quinone process. This was called setting for one. That image and an additional image, this was an exploration in additive white light holography. Again, these are all done with a single frequency krypton laser, but using triethanolamine to specifically tune it to 630 nanometers, a green exposure for 530, a red exposure but tuned to green, and a significant blue exposure at 450. And so the thing that was going on here is we were able to show clients that we had a path to color holography in 1984, which was giving us cyan, magenta, and yellow as the subtractive additives of the primary colors, as well as white. And this really launched Smith Inspectorvich because at a point we took these, we were going around to advertising agencies in the Chicago area that were dealing with print. And we were showing them these initial pieces that were being done in color and one of them hit. An accounting set for the McDonald's Corporation and an accounting set for the Franklin Company who were basically interested in looking for new media and ways of getting attention and for marketing their product, approached us and said, well, could you do an art piece? And could you find a way to introduce holography into the corporate stores and use this as a tool to give the funding to advance how you can make holograms? So this was a pretty generous project from the standpoint of, here was a potential commercial customer saying, we think you're getting somewhere interesting. If we give you a big enough project, will that give you the money you need to take this a little bit further? So we got a project to do what we call the McDonald's corporate hologram piece. And for attendees in 1985 of the second international symposium on display holography, you all got loaded on a bus and taken down to Oakbrook, Illinois. And you got to see this. There were six panels. They were arranged in a six-sided display. Each image was 12 by 18 inches, either two or three colors, again, using the triethanolamine technique. There was the corporate store, Ronald Chew's, a Big Mac exploded apart, scary in and of itself. The fry maker, the multi-mixer, which is how Ray Kroc made his money to start the McDonald's change in a McDonald's corporate mantra. The fry slicer, I included this image because this was a photograph of one of the pull-outs from the run, but it gave you a little bit of an idea. I didn't do a lot of documentation of the holograms at that time, but this was the original fry slicer. At that point, McDonald's has basically shipped potatoes to all the stores and they cut their fries. And then we had a sculpture made of all these fries that were glued with hot glue to a glass plate and floated in front, going into a box. So this is an example of a three-color hologram that was done for that installation. And there was also a model made of the original corporate store. This was lit sequentially for three separate transmission masters for three color-tuned transfers. A red for the internal lighting of the scene, which is what you see the model here, being lit for the internal master for the internal lights. And then this is, unfortunately, a very small section of a much bigger photo. You can see here, they have gold arches with a red interior, which you can't see, as there was a beautiful blue sky and there were trees in the model that you saw through them. And this is the installation that was actually in Hamburger U, they called it, in Oakbrook, Illinois, and it has six-sided pieces. And it was really for a pretty gutsy thing to have gone in with two 5x7 holograms and say to them, within six months we're going to have this. But we did it, we delivered on time. And this pretty much gave the laser Smith Infective the ability to really commercially go after the tool set needed for halography. But mid-80s, there was also this other issue. We were talking to the people that we thought were the ones that wanted to buy halography. And these are people doing marketing and advertising and print pieces. And they kept coming back to Austin saying, well, yeah, this is interesting, but we're not finding it as compelling that we've got to make little models all the time or we've got to do sculpture pieces. We want real life. We want imaging of real products, real people in real time. And this is what we're hearing from everybody, Leo Burnett, Jay Walter, Thompson, all the advertising agencies that we're going to. They're basically telling us talent sells products. They want images of talent and 3D using them. So that basically led to this. In 1987, we decided we have to, and even go farther than doing a person on a turntable or an object on a turntable, I wanted to pull together a system that would allow me to capture in real time either a high speed event or a sequential animated event. So this system, which represented probably the biggest financial investment that we had tried to do up to that point, was capable of capturing a 90 degree field of view. It could do stop frame, which means all 36 cameras fired simultaneously. Or with this electronics mechanism we designed, I could just run from 9.9 seconds to 1,000th of a second. We had very good oscilloscope data that told us we were actually getting that phase consistently. This is an example of the system in the studio, our first client, after we put it all together and did a set of images, we did a couple of baseball holograms. You saw one in that previous set where we went to upper deck and say, okay, now we can do baseball holograms the way you want to do them, people in real life hitting the ball, sliding into home plate. We had a nice contract to do a set of stereograms for their first hockey release. And basically this was a very arduous process at this point. We're still doing analog holography in a way, metan math to compute and set up for the red, green, blue slip positions. An Oxbury optical head, which was a $35,000 investment for having high registration 35 millimeter film transport. For all of these holograms, we were interested in mass replication technology, so those are all being done with the argon laser at 457, so we were shooting photo resist H2s. The H1s were tipped. So in addition to the fact that the plates at a specific position and the red, green, blue is calculated, they're going to be found at a certain angle along that, the reference beam, the tip, the plate and the whole system was tipped so that the reference beam came in at exactly 90 degrees from that. So it was splitting the object beam reference and that angle. So the fringes were perpendicular in the emulsion. So then when the emulsion shrank drawing, we wouldn't get any fringe collapse. So we keep efficiency, the image wouldn't shift, we wouldn't get other complications. And we also, because we were shooting in the photo resist and weren't interested in trying to shoot photo resist H1s, because just the fact that we had to physically drag this optical mask across the film, we were shooting silver halide and using pyrochrome as a development process because that yellow stain actually was perfect for absorbing the scatter. So we produced very clean, high quality H1 masters that a number of people in Ken Haynes said, I can't believe you're not shooting photo resist H1s. But that led to, for me, where I got the chance to get back into doing holography as a medium for my own work. And this was a project that led to a very successful product line, it was holographic moments. These were a series of embossed holograms, some were of dance images, some were animation, some were CG in real life and some were mixed. But these are images that we produced and ran from 1989 until 1986. This one here is one of the frames. Well, we've lost our color channel. There we go. And what? We're not. Yes, we're good. We're RGB again. And this was actually one of the first ones we did when we were testing the camera system. And it was one of my favorite set in the series. We also did, began because, I'll wrap this up towards the end, I'll talk about the impact of this PC and its ability. But we also started doing work with the blue screen. So this was, Chicago has an extremely enthusiastic Chinese community. And so we went down there one Chinese New Year and found a great lion dancer headed down the street and said, would you like to come to our studio and we can make a hologram of you? What a come on line. And so this was, this is the sequence from that 36 frames done on a blue screen. Now play nicely. There we go. So here you see the animation. See here, very careful attention to color, the red, the green, the blue. There's almost like a magenta red in that outfit. This is a CG scene that I did on a little PC running 3D studio at the time. Another image that was in the series was the geisha girl. We did this in 92. This probably represented the highest quality mix of the whole thing. So again, she was shot on a blue screen. The background is basically dropped in. That was again, registered or rendered. We were doing all of this in-house. We had all of this technology in-house. We had the computer systems, the rendering systems. I had an Oxbury film recorder. We were rendering all of the positives necessary for the optical printer. So this was a complete in-house. I think we spent over $120,000 to basically over a four-year period put together the technology to do these. This is a close-up of the hologram, not of the photograph, of just one frame. We also started doing work in just entirely CG scenes. So this is kind of like a dinosaur-iron exhibit that comes to life in the display. If you're at the museum, it's just six years old. The last thing you want to see is the dinosaur come back alive. This one sold very well for us. And there's also kind of been a little bit of misinformation and some people that have written about stereograms. From 1989 until 1994, while the holographic gallery scene was still an active and healthy scene, the holographic moments series were selling on average 100,000 holograms a year. They were the most significant volume holograms that were being bought. And I think part of it is because they were in color, they weren't all gold, they weren't all green, and they were animated. So we were shipping holograms to Brainit in Japan. We were shipping holograms to all of the holography gallery people that were in the United States. And we were shipping holograms. And so I had a little studio with three ladies that came in every day and matted holograms. Basically a complete in-house operation. And it was, for me, really rewarding because this was what my image of holography was really kind of about instead of these 2D flat little stickers. So it was a very fun program to run for those years. But it was really expensive to do this. You have a 36 camera system. You have the CG, the workstations, the Oxbury film recorder, and it would take a couple of weeks from the time you put together the talent, shot it in the studio, created the scenes, did the direct positives, loaded the film recorder, shot the H1, shot the H2. So it was a serious endeavor. And you remember, the first ones we did were manually, optically registered in a little 35 millimeter slide copy machine. So it was a big step from the first ones in 87 and 88 to all the ones where we all did, I did all the post-processing in the computer. But in 1997, a wonderful opportunity came available for me because I had been watching what was going on with digital hologram printing at MIT and Steve Benton's group. And then the summer after I sold the laser snuts, I got a phone call from Steve Benton and he asked me basically, would I like to make holograms again? So basically, I joined the Media Lab in November of 1997. And my primary four areas of research that I was officially told I had to make sure we're getting done every month, headtracked autostereoscopic displays, streaming multi-camera capture systems, a one-step full-color, full-parallax holographic printer, and kind of ongoing work with full-color holographic material with not only the DuPont 800 series, but also with Baron Haider's BB-Pan series materials. Because we were always testing new films for potentially what the holography class was going to maybe need someday. So in an aspect of brevity, because I know there's still five more papers to go on this afternoon, one brief little piece. The full-parallax full-color printer was a new direction. Michael Klugeven at MIT, Zebra imaging took off and got its leap out of MIT. And when I came in in the fall of 1997, they had left. So there was a very compelling need to make the holographic full-color printer that I designed to be doing some new science and break some new ground. So we directly went for the DMD, which is the digital mirror device as a spatial light modulator. Again, the three colors we were using, Krypton 647, Frequency Double Yeag 532, Argonne 457. But the other piece of the puzzle that we brought to this, and you're looking at a close-up of the optical printhead right here, was going for a 0.5 millimeter square pixel and just-in-time open GL renderer. Because there were basically 250,000 holograms in every 8x10. So you didn't really want to pre-render these everywhere and set them on a hard drive. So we had a printer designed and just basically said, I'm at pixel this position, please render me pixel next position. So it was rendered and thrown in the buffer. The other key aspect of this is this printer has a design of being a translating optical head. So we have the ability to do roll-to-roll imaging. So in other words, we can make the hologram 20 inches wide and as long as you want it. And here's an example of one of the last pieces that was imaged with it. This was done in 2003. PONDA was our sponsor. These are 0.5 millimeter pixels. This is an image showing the left, right, and the view. And this hologram is on display over at the Holography Art Exhibition. So the key thing I think is important to bring with it, I want to bring a little bit of discussion to, is that importance is the selection of the wavelengths in doing color holograms. This is not a minor one. It isn't just the issue of whether you're recording them at what wavelength they're shrinking to, but what wavelength they're playing back, the sensitivity of your eye. These are all things that we bring as the viewer of the hologram to the equation as well. So I found we were able to get extremely good results with the German BB-Pan as well as the DuPont 800 series. And here's a small hologram that is of a Chinese opera mask. So on earlier opera masks, there must have been a set of these made. And this is, again, the hologram. But I threw this in your animations to show you just how accurate the color is. This was done in the DuPont material. So again, this is a bit old. This was imaged originally as a hologram in 2003, and I just shot this video the week before I came. So the basis to all of my color work is really my photographic background. I have a stensive background in densitometry, and so there would be always a great deal of effort, paid attention to where these fit on the CIE chart. When we built the printer, I did a lot of holograms of red, green, and blue pixels and white pixels, and basically graphed that and took a look at what the gamut of the final hologram was compared to the original scene. All of this, I think, has a good impact on how high quality the final holograms could be. So that pretty much wrapped up what I was doing by 2004, and I had kind of thought by then, I was done with holography, had done a number of things. The imaging market still hadn't taken off, but I got fortunate. This past fall, there was a job application that went out, and I thought, I'm going to do holography again, so I threw in my resume, and fortunately enough, I got a phone call to come in for the interview. So at DeMontford University, in the Modern Holography Program, I have specific responsibility for the NAHO project, which is a red, green, blue, edge-lit HOE program, but we're also going to be getting a pulsed red, green, blue laser, so there is going to be continued research on true color pulse imaging, and there's going to be continued research on full parallax, full color printer technology. I think having tools like this in the schools, like they have printers right now where students study in 3D can take photographs, reduce stereograms, and then print them on the printer and laminate them on the back of a sheet of lenticular screen, and then look at their art in 3D, there needs to be this complement as a piece of hardware for a student in 3D media, which is a holographic printer, and we're going to see if we can get that realized. Utilizing the prior research I did at MIT and also leveraging some new ideas that we have. So definitely take the time to go and talk with Martin Richardson, he's got a great advanced holography program, he's taking graduate students for M-Phil and PhD programs, and with that, I just want to say, Sheche, this is an earlier thought, yes, I was a younger man, this is myself, TJ and Dr. Dennis Duke in 1992. Thank you.
 Well good afternoon and thank you TJ and  Dr. Fan for the invitation to come here to China.  It's my first visit to China and it's actually kind of nice to have it be kind of like a homecoming.  So many of my friends are here. We've come over as well as many as new friends that I have the opportunity to meet.  So again, thank you so much.  So this is going to be a 10-minute description of my first 20 years in holography.  I'm going to go through the description of the video.  Because it turns out that between 1979 and 2004, a  significant number of advances in technologies made themselves available to people working in the holographic medium.  So I want to give you a little bit of my background.  In 1979, I was the manager of a professional photo lab.  I spent my days basically color balancing prints to transparencies.  And I spent my nights running around with a view camera  photographing Chicago because I was really interested in becoming an art photographer doing landscape photography in those days.  So basically I had a very astute background in advanced color printing and dye transfer work.  But also at the same time I had run into a small hologram that thank you TJ  for showing at the beginning of this section that little hologram of the car in  playing back with laser light is the very first hologram that I saw at a museum and not actually a museum, but the School of the Art Institute in Chicago.  And that had an impact on me not so much because it was a three-dimensional object, but because I was looking at red light.  I was looking at an objects light that was really photons coming off of the film.  So between 1979 and 1981, I spent my summers attending holography workshops  with TJ who was bringing basically what has turned out to be the luminaries of  holography over those years as guest lecturers in interferometry and color holography.  And so that was my exposure to beginning holography, advanced imaging techniques.  And additionally as the years went on, I also had the opportunity to be a guest lecturer at those workshops for photoresist and embossed holography.  In 1980, I had the fortune of meeting another gentleman in holography, Tom Speckovich.  We were both at a club, both trying to talk to the same girl who eventually introduced us to each other, saying,  does this other guy that's talking to me about the same stuff as you, you should meet him.  So that's how I met Tom.  So in 1980, we started working on starting a holography group, the Chicago Holographic Cooperative.  And out of that came Smith and Speckovich Holography.  Our skill sets were about the process of making single and multiple color reflection holograms,  multi-color rainbow holograms, reflection color holograms that are contact copy with a contact copy system.  And then eventually led to a 36 camera real time capture system,  as well as all of the embossed imaging technologies like 2D, 3D, full color 2D, RGB stereograms,  in other words, full color stereograms with real life.  So that first period of time was pretty extensive.  But what launched it was in 1982.  There was an improvement with the denisuke process.  Pyrogalal developer and re-halogenating bleach had been a paper published a year before by Walter Spearing's.  There were two papers that were published in 1982 at the first international conference on holography  by Lon Moore and John Kaufman, which basically introduced the concept of using TEA,  which is triethanolamine, as a pre-swelling technique.  And Tom and I also had access to Zenith TV's research labs.  We were working with them making HOEs for projection television systems.  But because we had a key to the door, that meant we could come in at night and use their great set of tools  by looking at phosphors on TV tubes and mapping the spectrum and look at our holograms  and get some really good analytical data.  So that helped in that first year.  In 1984, I produced a small piece of one of my few art pieces, but I got to remember at the beginning of this,  I was an art photographer looking for a way to subsidize my equipment.  So this was a full color reflection piece that was done on Agfa film with GP62 and the P-benzo quinone process.  This was called setting for one.  That image and an additional image, this was an exploration in additive white light holography.  Again, these are all done with a single frequency krypton laser, but using triethanolamine  to specifically tune it to 630 nanometers, a green exposure for 530,  a red exposure but tuned to green, and a significant blue exposure at 450.  And so the thing that was going on here is we were able to show clients that we had a path  to color holography in 1984, which was giving us cyan, magenta, and yellow as the subtractive  additives of the primary colors, as well as white.  And this really launched Smith Inspectorvich because at a point we took these,  we were going around to advertising agencies in the Chicago area that were dealing with print.  And we were showing them these initial pieces that were being done in color and one of them hit.  An accounting set for the McDonald's Corporation and an accounting set for the Franklin Company  who were basically interested in looking for new media and ways of getting attention  and for marketing their product, approached us and said, well, could you do an art piece?  And could you find a way to introduce holography into the corporate stores  and use this as a tool to give the funding to advance how you can make holograms?  So this was a pretty generous project from the standpoint of, here was a potential commercial  customer saying, we think you're getting somewhere interesting.  If we give you a big enough project, will that give you the money you need to take this a little bit further?  So we got a project to do what we call the McDonald's corporate hologram piece.  And for attendees in 1985 of the second international symposium on display holography,  you all got loaded on a bus and taken down to Oakbrook, Illinois.  And you got to see this.  There were six panels.  They were arranged in a six-sided display.  Each image was 12 by 18 inches, either two or three colors, again, using the triethanolamine technique.  There was the corporate store, Ronald Chew's, a Big Mac exploded apart, scary in and of itself.  The fry maker, the multi-mixer, which is how Ray Kroc made his money to start the McDonald's change  in a McDonald's corporate mantra.  The fry slicer, I included this image because this was a photograph of one of the pull-outs from the run,  but it gave you a little bit of an idea.  I didn't do a lot of documentation of the holograms at that time, but this was the original fry slicer.  At that point, McDonald's has basically shipped potatoes to all the stores and they cut their fries.  And then we had a sculpture made of all these fries that were glued with hot glue to a glass plate  and floated in front, going into a box.  So this is an example of a three-color hologram that was done for that installation.  And there was also a model made of the original corporate store.  This was lit sequentially for three separate transmission masters for three color-tuned transfers.  A red for the internal lighting of the scene, which is what you see the model here,  being lit for the internal master for the internal lights.  And then this is, unfortunately, a very small section of a much bigger photo.  You can see here, they have gold arches with a red interior, which you can't see,  as there was a beautiful blue sky and there were trees in the model that you saw through them.  And this is the installation that was actually in Hamburger U, they called it,  in Oakbrook, Illinois, and it has six-sided pieces.  And it was really for a pretty gutsy thing to have gone in with two 5x7 holograms  and say to them, within six months we're going to have this.  But we did it, we delivered on time.  And this pretty much gave the laser Smith Infective the ability to really commercially go after the tool set needed for halography.  But mid-80s, there was also this other issue.  We were talking to the people that we thought were the ones that wanted to buy halography.  And these are people doing marketing and advertising and print pieces.  And they kept coming back to Austin saying, well, yeah, this is interesting,  but we're not finding it as compelling that we've got to make little models all the time  or we've got to do sculpture pieces.  We want real life. We want imaging of real products, real people in real time.  And this is what we're hearing from everybody, Leo Burnett, Jay Walter, Thompson,  all the advertising agencies that we're going to.  They're basically telling us talent sells products.  They want images of talent and 3D using them.  So that basically led to this.  In 1987, we decided we have to, and even go farther than doing a person on a turntable  or an object on a turntable, I wanted to pull together a system  that would allow me to capture in real time either a high speed event  or a sequential animated event.  So this system, which represented probably the biggest financial investment  that we had tried to do up to that point, was capable of capturing a 90 degree field of view.  It could do stop frame, which means all 36 cameras fired simultaneously.  Or with this electronics mechanism we designed, I could just run from 9.9 seconds to 1,000th of a second.  We had very good oscilloscope data that told us we were actually getting that phase consistently.  This is an example of the system in the studio, our first client, after we put it all together  and did a set of images, we did a couple of baseball holograms.  You saw one in that previous set where we went to upper deck and say,  okay, now we can do baseball holograms the way you want to do them,  people in real life hitting the ball, sliding into home plate.  We had a nice contract to do a set of stereograms for their first hockey release.  And basically this was a very arduous process at this point.  We're still doing analog holography in a way, metan math to compute and set up for the red, green, blue slip positions.  An Oxbury optical head, which was a $35,000 investment for having high registration 35 millimeter film transport.  For all of these holograms, we were interested in mass replication technology,  so those are all being done with the argon laser at 457, so we were shooting photo resist H2s.  The H1s were tipped.  So in addition to the fact that the plates at a specific position and the red, green, blue is calculated,  they're going to be found at a certain angle along that,  the reference beam, the tip, the plate and the whole system was tipped so that the reference beam came in at exactly 90 degrees from that.  So it was splitting the object beam reference and that angle.  So the fringes were perpendicular in the emulsion.  So then when the emulsion shrank drawing, we wouldn't get any fringe collapse.  So we keep efficiency, the image wouldn't shift, we wouldn't get other complications.  And we also, because we were shooting in the photo resist and weren't interested in trying to shoot photo resist H1s,  because just the fact that we had to physically drag this optical mask across the film,  we were shooting silver halide and using pyrochrome as a development process  because that yellow stain actually was perfect for absorbing the scatter.  So we produced very clean, high quality H1 masters that a number of people in Ken Haynes said,  I can't believe you're not shooting photo resist H1s.  But that led to, for me, where I got the chance to get back into doing holography as a medium for my own work.  And this was a project that led to a very successful product line, it was holographic moments.  These were a series of embossed holograms, some were of dance images, some were animation,  some were CG in real life and some were mixed.  But these are images that we produced and ran from 1989 until 1986.  This one here is one of the frames.  Well, we've lost our color channel.  There we go.  And what?  We're not.  Yes, we're good.  We're RGB again.  And this was actually one of the first ones we did when we were testing the camera system.  And it was one of my favorite set in the series.  We also did, began because, I'll wrap this up towards the end, I'll talk about the impact of this PC and its ability.  But we also started doing work with the blue screen.  So this was, Chicago has an extremely enthusiastic Chinese community.  And so we went down there one Chinese New Year and found a great lion dancer headed down the street and said,  would you like to come to our studio and we can make a hologram of you?  What a come on line.  And so this was, this is the sequence from that 36 frames done on a blue screen.  Now play nicely.  There we go.  So here you see the animation.  See here, very careful attention to color, the red, the green, the blue.  There's almost like a magenta red in that outfit.  This is a CG scene that I did on a little PC running 3D studio at the time.  Another image that was in the series was the geisha girl.  We did this in 92.  This probably represented the highest quality mix of the whole thing.  So again, she was shot on a blue screen.  The background is basically dropped in.  That was again, registered or rendered.  We were doing all of this in-house.  We had all of this technology in-house.  We had the computer systems, the rendering systems.  I had an Oxbury film recorder.  We were rendering all of the positives necessary for the optical printer.  So this was a complete in-house.  I think we spent over $120,000 to basically over a four-year period put together the technology to do these.  This is a close-up of the hologram, not of the photograph, of just one frame.  We also started doing work in just entirely CG scenes.  So this is kind of like a dinosaur-iron exhibit that comes to life in the display.  If you're at the museum, it's just six years old.  The last thing you want to see is the dinosaur come back alive.  This one sold very well for us.  And there's also kind of been a little bit of misinformation  and some people that have written about stereograms.  From 1989 until 1994, while the holographic gallery scene was still an active and healthy scene,  the holographic moments series were selling on average 100,000 holograms a year.  They were the most significant volume holograms that were being bought.  And I think part of it is because they were in color, they weren't all gold, they weren't all green, and they were animated.  So we were shipping holograms to Brainit in Japan.  We were shipping holograms to all of the holography gallery people that were in the United States.  And we were shipping holograms.  And so I had a little studio with three ladies that came in every day and matted holograms.  Basically a complete in-house operation.  And it was, for me, really rewarding because this was what my image of holography was really kind of about  instead of these 2D flat little stickers.  So it was a very fun program to run for those years.  But it was really expensive to do this.  You have a 36 camera system.  You have the CG, the workstations, the Oxbury film recorder, and it would take a couple of weeks from the time you  put together the talent, shot it in the studio, created the scenes, did the direct positives, loaded the film recorder,  shot the H1, shot the H2.  So it was a serious endeavor.  And you remember, the first ones we did were manually, optically registered in a little 35 millimeter slide copy machine.  So it was a big step from the first ones in 87 and 88 to all the ones where we all did, I did all the post-processing in the computer.  But in 1997, a wonderful opportunity came available for me because I had been watching what was going on with digital hologram  printing at MIT and Steve Benton's group.  And then the summer after I sold the laser snuts, I got a phone call from Steve Benton and he asked me basically,  would I like to make holograms again?  So basically, I joined the Media Lab in November of 1997.  And my primary four areas of research that I was officially told I had to make sure we're getting done every month,  headtracked autostereoscopic displays, streaming multi-camera capture systems, a one-step full-color, full-parallax holographic printer,  and kind of ongoing work with full-color holographic material with not only the DuPont 800 series, but also with Baron Haider's BB-Pan series materials.  Because we were always testing new films for potentially what the holography class was going to maybe need someday.  So in an aspect of brevity, because I know there's still five more papers to go on this afternoon, one brief little piece.  The full-parallax full-color printer was a new direction.  Michael Klugeven at MIT, Zebra imaging took off and got its leap out of MIT.  And when I came in in the fall of 1997, they had left.  So there was a very compelling need to make the holographic full-color printer that I designed to be doing some new science and break some new ground.  So we directly went for the DMD, which is the digital mirror device as a spatial light modulator.  Again, the three colors we were using, Krypton 647, Frequency Double Yeag 532, Argonne 457.  But the other piece of the puzzle that we brought to this, and you're looking at a close-up of the optical printhead right here,  was going for a 0.5 millimeter square pixel and just-in-time open GL renderer.  Because there were basically 250,000 holograms in every 8x10.  So you didn't really want to pre-render these everywhere and set them on a hard drive.  So we had a printer designed and just basically said, I'm at pixel this position, please render me pixel next position.  So it was rendered and thrown in the buffer.  The other key aspect of this is this printer has a design of being a translating optical head.  So we have the ability to do roll-to-roll imaging.  So in other words, we can make the hologram 20 inches wide and as long as you want it.  And here's an example of one of the last pieces that was imaged with it.  This was done in 2003.  PONDA was our sponsor. These are 0.5 millimeter pixels.  This is an image showing the left, right, and the view.  And this hologram is on display over at the Holography Art Exhibition.  So the key thing I think is important to bring with it, I want to bring a little bit of discussion to,  is that importance is the selection of the wavelengths in doing color holograms.  This is not a minor one. It isn't just the issue of whether you're recording them at what wavelength they're shrinking to,  but what wavelength they're playing back, the sensitivity of your eye.  These are all things that we bring as the viewer of the hologram to the equation as well.  So I found we were able to get extremely good results with the German BB-Pan as well as the DuPont 800 series.  And here's a small hologram that is of a Chinese opera mask.  So on earlier opera masks, there must have been a set of these made.  And this is, again, the hologram.  But I threw this in your animations to show you just how accurate the color is.  This was done in the DuPont material.  So again, this is a bit old. This was imaged originally as a hologram in 2003,  and I just shot this video the week before I came.  So the basis to all of my color work is really my photographic background.  I have a stensive background in densitometry, and so there would be always a great deal of effort,  paid attention to where these fit on the CIE chart.  When we built the printer, I did a lot of holograms of red, green, and blue pixels and white pixels,  and basically graphed that and took a look at what the gamut of the final hologram was compared to the original scene.  All of this, I think, has a good impact on how high quality the final holograms could be.  So that pretty much wrapped up what I was doing by 2004, and I had kind of thought by then,  I was done with holography, had done a number of things.  The imaging market still hadn't taken off, but I got fortunate.  This past fall, there was a job application that went out, and I thought,  I'm going to do holography again, so I threw in my resume, and fortunately enough,  I got a phone call to come in for the interview.  So at DeMontford University, in the Modern Holography Program,  I have specific responsibility for the NAHO project, which is a red, green, blue, edge-lit HOE program,  but we're also going to be getting a pulsed red, green, blue laser,  so there is going to be continued research on true color pulse imaging,  and there's going to be continued research on full parallax, full color printer technology.  I think having tools like this in the schools, like they have printers right now  where students study in 3D can take photographs, reduce stereograms,  and then print them on the printer and laminate them on the back of a sheet of lenticular screen,  and then look at their art in 3D, there needs to be this complement as a piece of hardware for a student in 3D media,  which is a holographic printer, and we're going to see if we can get that realized.  Utilizing the prior research I did at MIT and also leveraging some new ideas that we have.  So definitely take the time to go and talk with Martin Richardson, he's got a great advanced holography program,  he's taking graduate students for M-Phil and PhD programs, and with that, I just want to say,  Sheche, this is an earlier thought, yes, I was a younger man, this is myself, TJ and Dr. Dennis Duke in 1992.  Thank you.
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