Show HN: LitiHolo – a desktop 3D hologram printer that makes true holograms
litiholo.com
litiholo.com
1) http://www.litiholo.com/images/buzz-on-the-printer-crop-809x... Wondering what the artifacting is on the left side of the hologram itself? Is this a problem with this specific hologram, or will all holograms have this artifacting?
2) Same image, but I'm not quite sure Buzz is centered in the middle of the ... work plate? Glass? Others are a bit more aligned to the edges, but are instead offset in various directions. For aesthetics, what would prevent a hologram from being perfectly centered and rotated to the plate?
3) They all have a little stray hologram pixel in the top right corner of each hologram, intentional? Fixable? Shortcoming of the technique?
4) A lot of the plates look a little smudged/finger-printy. Is it possible to clean the hologram plates/film after "printing" to have a clean shiny surface?
5) I don't see an example of an image that has been printed corner-to-corner? How much of this hologram film has been applied? Is it possible to make a full plate hologram? And/or trim the edges afterwards? (It looks like glass plates, so... probably hard for a layperson to cut?)
6) Open source firmware? Gcode? Toolchain? Hacker friendly? (Ctrl-f Firm, Open, or Code resulted in 0 results.)
Just to end in a compliment sandwich, it's totally cool and would definitely have a place in budding maker's labs, and new niche stores! I could see the output being relatively popular on like... Etsy. Super affordable at $1,600 when stacked next to a 3D Printer, or Laser Cutter, etc. I love the idea and DO want one of my own... But trying to identify the shortcomings.
Thanks for the compliments! Hope to see you as a backer and please recommend to the maker spaces you know.
If so, that is a complete dealbreaker for me. I'd assume that is also the case for others as well.
I appreciate your input as a holographer, and we are hoping to help create a lot more holographers in the future who will have access to their own 3D Hologram Printer.
I've been involved with hologram printers all the way back to my grad school days (MIT Media Lab), and have built custom industrial versions for in-house commercial hologram work. But more recently LitiHolo has been focused on simple educational holograms kits. With this 3D Hologram Printer, we are kind of bringing the two together -- a simple hologram printer that makes the technology more affordable and accessible.
These are true laser-recorded holograms, and we are starting small and simple to get things off the ground (think Makerbot for holograms). Would love your feedback on how we can continue to make hologram technology like this more accessible, as well as ideas for possible killer apps and use cases.
Here's our previous HN post from 12 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22616010
And full disclosure: we have launched a Kickstarter project for this, but would appreciate your input whether you back the project or not.
I tried searching for the term "hogel size" I assume it is somewhat equivalent to resolution. Can you expand on it and tell us what are the limiting factors around resolution and how it can be improved in the future?
I am now curious how commercial sticker size holograms are printed.
• Knock off the first 30 seconds of your 'interior shots' video where the machine is presumably registering itself. I don't much care about that :)
• Show the resultant printed film from the side on somewhere, so we can see how thin it is. From first glance, I got the impression the output was quite thick, whereas apparently it's only 16 microns (taken from your spec sheet). It might seem obvious to you, but it wasn't here and I think would be much more impressive.
Neat tech, I've forwarded it to someone who might have use for it.
Good luck!
ed - eg. each 16 micron sheet is side-illuminated with a specific colour, and then three or more holographic sheets are embedded in between the glass plate and cover?
We've started with a printer that is single-color initially to get this off the ground, but eventually we would like to have a full-color version of the printer in the future with RGB recording directly in one layer.
Would it be possible to use these as badge photos? I feel like it would be pretty cool to have a hologram picture on your badge.
Will work on seeing if we can get better imagery of the hologram thickness.
Also sometimes called white-light holograms because they can be viewed with a regular spot light, sunlight, or even a smartphone flashlight.
One of the other very memorable holograms out there is the Kiss, which is also possible (see our Kiss demo hologram).
I think holographic cameras would certainly be something that would be in the future for us. Glad to see you are already looking there!
I really need to acquire a bunch for the science museum I'm going to open. Will probably need a bunch of kits as well. This is the sort of thing that can change someone's life as a child. There's no replacement for that sense of wonder.
Hopefully there will be a series of holograms made on our 3D Hologram Printer as an homage to older holograms like this that made an impression. That is what we were trying to do with our Kiss hologram.
Excited to follow your project and eventually have one sitting in my workshop!
Let me know if you know anyone at Glowforge that could be a guide through the process. Always good to be able to bounce things off someone who's been there.
However, existing embossed holograms do have the surface relief and can be used for this.
I the appendix we speculated that it might be possible to clevery use GPUs ("3d accelerators" back then ;-)) to do the calculation in realtime and show it on a very high DPI screen. Some time I'd really like to revisit the project with today's technology.
3D computational advances certainly have helped, and we expect even more as our hologram printers get more advanced with time. Thanks.
Also wondering how feasible it is to "reproject" a hologram from one plane to another - rendering multiple "objects" into one hologram/interference pattern.
And a holographic interference pattern is definitely a way to store a 3D image in a 2D plane, and I think a part of what won the Nobel prize in physics when holography was invented.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/software/realt...
And go MIT!
Super cool anyway !
We liked the hologram kits, but we needed something to take us to the next level with our hologram technology, and the 3D Hologram Printer is that step for us.
The hologram film continues to be available, and will be the same film we use for the printer.
I don't know anything about holograms, or about optics (I'm currently implementing code that takes advantage of OpenCV's camera calibration and don't even know some of the basics).
But I've read recently that some companies are trying to make better cameras (for phones etc) by making a meta-lens -- a single, flat lens with a highly detailed surface that can do the job that currently requires multiple curved lenses.
Do holograms have anything in common with surfaces like that?
If HOEs can direct light like several optical lenses combined into one, with a reflective enough surface, could holograms theoretically be used as some type of reflective (rather than refractive) lens like that for a smartphone (etc) camera? Can they reflect all wavelengths of visible light like you would need? Is anyone doing work in this area now?
There are even periscopic cameras in phones today - could we one day have a high quality camera in a slim device with one or two reflective lenses and no refractive element at all?
What's the difference like between something like LitiHolo and a machine required to make an HOE? What are the main relevant spec measures? I'm not sure if holograms have some equivalent of resolution, or similar.
Recently, Maimone et al at Oculus/Facebook Reality Labs used our hologram film to make a design for a thinner VR headset using pancake lenses incorporating holograms: https://research.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Holograph...
I heard that even early Apple people would say "A computer in every household", and people would ask, "What would I do with a computer?" and their best answer was "It's a great way to store and file your recipes."
But we are starting with something more simple, and not trying to promise everything to everyone. That does mean looking for initial use cases that will take off early.
3d tv flopped, it could have been a start of something, terrible as it was. Lightfield cameras didn’t take off either, maybe because of the price. Let’s hope this could be a beginning!
Of course, I’ll have to play with the small ones first, to get a feel for what the tech can and cannot do…
Tiling of the holograms (making smaller holograms that can be tiled to make a larger one) is something we've definitely thought about, and even contemplated for a Kickstarter stretch goal. Wall size holograms would be fun!
Source: I used to work for a startup that provided this service. We ran out of money.
Similar to 3D printing, putting one in your workshop is different than just knowing that there is a workshop out there that will make one for you.
Additionally, separate holograms could be tiled together to make a larger hologram as well. We even thought about having tiling as a stretch goal for the Kickstarter.
Probably want to add that, not only for avoiding the red key at the top but for performance reasons.
Offtopic: They say "MIT Media Lab" and for me it just triggers thoughts of Epstein and Aaron Schwartz. It's become a stain in the collective unconscious, much in a similar vein to many people's negative viewpoint of law enforcement. The lesson of our times is this: police your in-group before society does, because society will come down far harder.
Edit: I see OP is the founder and this is a smaller project. Looks really cool and sorry if that sounded negative! Just not what I expected from the title.
This hogel approach to recording the hologram in segments allows of capturing people, computer graphics, and much more than analog holograms that can only capture inanimate object. However our LitiHolo film can do analog holograms as well, if interested.
We see this as the building blocks for eventual holograms with full-motion. There has been a lot of research and ideas in that area, but still needs development.
Just make sure you don't pull a stunt like Cricut recently has and piss off your entire userbase ;P
Where things like lenticulars do have fundamental limits concerning depth vs resolution based on diffraction limits, holograms do not have similar constraints.
Ultimately, there is no reason these holograms can't reach resolutions similar to print (and better). Following the 3D printing market examples, we chose to start simple and then build on that as we progress in the future.
I'd like to buy a couple of pre-made holograms just to get a feel for them, but can't find anywhere selling them?
I appreciate your input as a holographer, and we are hoping to help create a lot more holographers in the future who will have access to their own 3D Hologram Printer.
Does these holograms work for more than one viewer at once?
Yes, this hogel information is permanently exposed onto the hologram film.
It's a sequence of frames encoded by viewing angles respective to the print surface. This printer lets you make your own lenticular cards, except they're smooth in texture.
EDIT: thanks for expanding my understanding of what holograms are :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hologram disagrees. This appears to be using real laser holography.
I appreciate your input as a holographer, and we are hoping to help create a lot more holographers in the future who will have access to their own 3D Hologram Printer.