Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Emerging Tech
  3. News

New printer creates colorful, more realistic 3D digital holograms

By
Add as a preferred source on Google

The new printer uses low-power continuous-wave lasers to create holograms on a highly sensitive photomaterial developed by the researchers. C Yves GENTET

A French company has come up with a new technique for printing holograms — 2D images which appear to be 3D. The Chimera printer can print brighter, more detailed holograms than previous hologram printing technologies.

Recommended Videos

“Our 15-year research project aimed to build a hologram printer with all the advantages of previous technologies while eliminating known drawbacks such as expensive lasers, slow printing speed, limited field of view and unsaturated colors,” research team leader Yves Gentet from Ultimate Holography in France said in a statement. “We accomplished this by creating the Chimera printer, which uses low-cost commercial lasers and high-speed printing to produce holograms with high-quality color that spans a large dynamic range.”

Previous holographic printing technology has used rigid materials and had limited color range and saturation. The new printer uses a specially developed highly sensitive photomaterial which has a very fine grain and can print holograms of up to 60 by 80 centimeters. The printed holograms are more brightly colored and also have improved clarity.

“The new system offers a much wider field of view, higher resolution, and noticeably better color rendition and dynamic range than previous systems,” Gentet said. “The full-color holographic material we developed provides improved brightness and clarity while the low-power, continuous-wave lasers make the system easy to use.”

To achieve this better color accuracy and clarity, the printer uses lasers in red, green, and blue which have shutters that allow the exposure of each color to be adjusted in millisecond intervals. The lasers are pointed each in turn at holographic elements called hogels, which are similar to a 3D version of a pixel. Hogel by hogel, the image is printed.

At the end of the printing process, you are left with a hologram with a 120-degree field of view, which means the flat image appears three dimensional when viewed from any angle within the 120-degree radius.

“The new system offers a much wider field of view, higher resolution and noticeably better color rendition and dynamic range than previous systems,” said Gentet. “The full-color holographic material we developed provides improved brightness and clarity while the low-power, continuous-wave lasers make the system easy to use.”

The new printing method is described in a paper in the journal Applied Optics.

Georgina Torbet
Georgina Torbet
Former Space Writer
Georgina has been the space writer at Digital Trends space writer for six years, covering human space exploration, planetary…
Topics
AI security cameras may soon recognize your walk before they recognize your face
A new AI gait system tracks body motion through skeletal keypoints, aiming at long-range identity checks where face scans and fingerprints fall short.
Security cam

Security cameras are built to look for faces. New research suggests they may soon have another target, the small habits buried in the way someone walks.

A paper published in the International Journal of Reasoning-based Intelligent Systems describes SKDMap-Net as a gait recognition system designed to identify people from walking video, even when the camera doesn’t get a clean look at their face. Instead of relying on a close-up scan, it studies how a body moves from frame to frame.

Read more
A 20-second 3D printer breakthrough comes with exactly the kind of catch science loves
The process can create complex microstructures far faster than some laser-based methods, but full 3D control is still a work in progress.
Aluminium, Smoke Pipe

A 3D printer that can make a structure in about 20 seconds sounds like a lab claim wearing a cape. The clever bit is real. The catch arrives before anyone starts dreaming about instant replacement parts.

University of Utah researchers have demonstrated a holographic 3D printing technique that hardens tiny structures in one exposure instead of building them layer by layer. That one-shot approach could avoid the weak, leaky seams that stacked printing can leave behind. For now, though, this is a tool for microstructures, not a shortcut to printing whatever object pops into your head.

Read more
Amazon is full of copycats and shady brands. This Chrome extension lets you avoid them.
Advertisement, Poster, Text

Shopping on Amazon used to be simple. You searched for a product, compared a few familiar brands, and checked out. These days, it often feels like you're scrolling through an endless parade of names that look like someone leaned on a keyboard before hitting publish. That's exactly the problem Knockoff is trying to solve.

Created by developer Josh Pigford, the Chrome extension doesn't promise to expose counterfeit products or magically tell you what's good. Instead, it tackles something arguably more annoying: the flood of unfamiliar, mass-produced brands that dominate Amazon search results.

Read more