Holographic Cinema: A New World

Laura Smithson

DIG4905

Expanded Cinema

PART SEVEN: Holographic Cinema: A New World

Youngblood begins this chapter with a story of his own, recalling being one of the few people to view the world's first successful holographic film in California in 1969. He compares the progress of holographic cinema at that time to that of conventional cinema in 1900 – flourishing though in a embryonic, developmental stage. As this new technology emerges and we learn more about it through experimentation, several myths and misconceptions arise regarding the present and future of this new field. Youngblood uses Part Seven of his text to debunk some of those myths, and to describe some real future possibilities brought to us through holographic technology.

The first and most extraordinary aspect of holographic film is the idea that no optical image is actually formed.  Unlike conventional photography, the light waves used to create a holographic image need not pass through a lens; instead, the diffraction patterns of the light waves reflecting off the subject are captured straight onto a photosensitive surface. The diffraction pattern, or wave front, of the object is created by the reflection of light waves off every point on the object. Youngblood compares the way these points reflect circular waves to the way that ripples form concentrically in a puddle, intersecting and losing amplitude as the concentric waves move outward.

In 1947, Dr. Dennis Gabor of the Imperial College of Science and Technology in London discovered that the key to capturing and recreating these wave fronts was to record both the intensity and frequency of the light waves hitting the object. Unlike conventional photography, which recorded only the intensity of the light, creating a 3-dimensional image required information about the frequency of the light waves. The way to do this was to imprint the interference patterns of the light waves onto a photosensitive surface.

As implied by the example of the rings-in-a-puddle behavior of light diffraction, light waves lose their cohesiveness in the same way that ripples dissipate as they move farther from their point. The ability of light waves to remain “in step” with one another over distance is referred to as light’s cohesiveness. White light, or sunlight, has a very short cohesive length and would not make for quality holographs; the ideal light to use would be one whose waves all traveled at the same frequency and therefore were totally coherent. It wasn’t until the mid-1960s when the LASER (Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation) was invented and used to improve upon Dr. Gabor’s initial technique that the first successful three-dimensional image was created by Emmett N. Leith and Juris Upatnieks of the University of Michigan.

In Leith and Upatnieks’ technique, a prism was used to derive two beams from one laser: a subject beam to illuminate the object, and the reference beam to interfere with it. The pattern created by the interaction of these two beams was recorded onto a photographic plate to form the hologram. When the image is recreated using a beam shaped exactly like the object itself, no polarized lenses are required to see the image as in the stereoptic process of “3-D” movies. Youngblood distinguishes between true 3-D and stereoptic illusion by explaining the phenomenon of parallax. In Theoretically, in holographic cinema, one could actually view all sides and perspectives of the object by moving peripherally around it.

Of course, there are limitations to this concept. The viewer’s perspective is restricted by the frame size of the plate or film strip being used as a photographic surface. The largest holographic plates are only one to two square feet, and the largest practical motion-picture film is only 70mm wide. This limitation creates the effect of looking through a small window into a larger 3-D space. Because of this small viewing window, the size of its audience would be greatly limited: only one or two people could comfortably view a holographic plate at a time.

The first successful motion-picture hologram to which Youngblood refers in the beginning of this chapter was created by Dr. Alex Jacobson and his colleague Victor Evtuhov, and it debuted in 1969 at Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu, California. It was the first film to animate in real-time a holographic image: 30 seconds of footage of tropical fish swimming in an aquarium. Until this point, the only holographic animation was artificial; the technique involved recording several separate but stationary holograms on tiny vertical strips across a plate. To view the “animation”, one moved either his head or the plate side to side which created the illusion of movement. Jacobson’s aquarium movie used a pulsed ruby laser for extremely brief exposure to avoid blurred movement, and very high resolution holographic film. This 30-second film was the product of eight months of labor and several thousands of dollars in equipment.

The different types of lasers used in holography each have benefits and drawbacks: some have higher speed capability, some have higher quality resolution.  With all types, the hologram created is a monochromatic red or blue-green (black and white holography is not possible) image. The possibility of optically mixing these colors using two lasers has been suggested, but Jacobson argues that color is not the prior limitation to holography. First and foremost, he says, holographic cinema is limited by illumination. In order to illuminate a room-sized scene viewable to several audience members at once, one would need a laser just about as powerful, he jests, as Grand Coulee Dam. For successful commercial holography, Jacobson says,

“You need two combinations: enough energy to illuminate the scene and expose the film, and you also need it in a very short time to avoid motion blur. Instead of using one illuminator you could use ten or fifteen lasers. That's a possibility. But the cost and volume of equipment would still be prohibitive."

Youngblood addresses the misconception of the interactive hologram – an image with which an audience can move around and through in 3-D space while viewing it. He explains that though this is a possibility for the future of holographic cinema, the lens-free creation of the image always yields a virtual, rather than real, image on the opposite side of the film from the viewer. In order to see the real image itself, a system would have to be invented to reverse the holographic process and project it onto the opposite side of the film. We can look to ancient mirror-and-lens techniques used by Egyptians to create the famous “Illusion of the Rose in the Vase” for inspiration in developing a system like this.

Another limitation of projected holography is its total dependence on actuality. Youngblood explains that, unlike television or cinema in which the focus of the audience’s eye is controlled by the camera lens, holography allows its audience to look at whatever aspect of the image that it wants, and to focus on whatever it chooses, much like any live performance.  The tricks and jumpcuts that can be done with a camera are unlikely to be seen in holography. The prospect of computer-generated holographs, however, creates a potential window of opportunity to create abstract 3-D images without manually recording wave front patterns from a physical object. The possibilities created when the necessity for a physical object is eliminated are endless.

The end of this chapter makes a brave leap into a conjecture that technology will be our savior in our human condition. Youngblood argues that technology is the only thing that keeps man human: we are only as free as the deployment of our technology and the effectiveness of our politics allow us to be. He discusses a new consciousness that suits the technology, the government we create, to man – not the other way around. He coins the term “technoanarchy” for the way technology will help us to find a natural order, to rid ourselves of officialdom, and to close the gap between ourselves and our environment. Technology is man’s most valuable accomplishment. We can use it to create our own world for ourselves – each and every one of us, with our own perception of the world – and bring ourselves closer to what we perceive to be a perfect world.

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Relevant Definitions

Wave front: the locus of points having the same phase: a line or curve in 2d, or a surface for a wave propagating in 3d

Cohesiveness (coherence): the propagation distance over which a coherent wave (e.g. an electromagnetic wave) maintains a specified degree of coherence

Parallax: a displacement or difference in the apparent position of an object viewed along two different lines of sight; parallax is measured by the angle or semi-angle of inclination between those two lines