Pretty neat. This seems like it actually exposes holograms the "hard" way, like you would do in a traditional setup (with lasers and beam splitters). A shortcut would be too directly print the very fine pattern that is on the holographic plate - basically a fourier transform of the image you want to encode. When I was in university we did a student's project on computer generated holograms and tried that - with a special ultra high dpi slide printer it didn't work, but strangely with a regular laser printer. The resolution was too coarse and the scale of the hologram was off, but it was really cool - if you reflect laser light from the plate, it looked as if the object was really there.

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.