Three GUARANTEED Ways to Fail at Department of Defense SBIRs

A month or so ago Lisa Grossman’s article “Plasmons Create Beautiful Holograms” at Wired caught my attention. The article highlights the work of a team of researchers in Japan who have developed a new way to illuminate color holograms (M. Ozaki, et al, Science 332, 218–220). The line in the article that grabbed me was:

“In a conventional hologram, if you change the angle, the color changes,” said optical physicist Satoshi Kawata of Osaka University in Japan. “Our hologram shows natural color at any angle you observe.”

Color reproduction is one of the key reasons why holography has not taken off commercially, and the above blurb makes it sound as if this new type of hologram solves that issue. After studying the original paper, though, my conclusion is that the importance (and veracity) of the angular insensitivity was overstated. In this blog post I will describe how holograms work, how the plasmon hologram does not really solve the angle problem, and why the research is cool anyway. But first a true story about why color reproduction is so important in holograms.

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Photograph of Kodak's new laser-based cinematic projector

This past Tuesday I got to see a demo of Kodak’s new laser-based digital cinematic projector prototype. The venue itself was pretty impressive: Kodak’s “Theater on the Ridge.” When we entered the lobby my friend (and fellow cinema-geek) Paul said, “Did we just walk through a time machine to the 1950s?”, and he meant that in the best possible way. They just don’t make ‘em like this anymore. The theater is a classic, enormous, and built-to-last… think late 50′s Cadillac (without the fins).

Although Kodak is principally promoting their laser projector’s reduced total-cost ownership, the projector has three striking technical advantages over a conventional cinematic projector. Read the rest of this entry »