Holography. I dream of one day getting a quiet place to live with a huge walk-in closet to set up a darkroom in for holography. And once I get that I’ll start dreaming of getting my hands on a pulse laser
The least temperamental kind to create and display are 540 nm (red) reflection holograms. To create, you get a laser pointer, gut it, turn it on for 15 minutes to let it stop doing funky diode stuff, set up your diorama behind the photo plate, and then shine the laser through the plate onto the diorama for however long your plate takes to develop. And to display it, you just need a point source of light, like a bright red LED.
Compare this with a green or blue hologram, which at the low end needs a high quality laser, a vibration-cancelling optical table, and even with all this can still be ruined by someone coughing in the other room. Or a transmission hologram, which at minimum needs a beam-splitter to create and must be displayed with the same color laser or the scale will be magnified or shrunk a bit, unless you are willing to make a rainbow hologram which also requires either an optical-grade cylindrical mirror/lens or some experimenting with paper slits, followed by a second pass through projecting the master print on the rainbow print.
I’m skipping a lot of details on the setup, but you get the gist. This all being said, the coolest holograms are rainbow holos
Sounds pretty involved, but I might have to experiment with this. Thanks for the info! I’m going to start researching a bit more, and see if I can squeeze some R&D funds from work.
Good luck! Like I said earlier, this is all pretty aspirational for me since I don’t have a good space to do any of this and likely will not in the near future either. Even if I go with the shoebox method (use fibre-optic cables to compress the darkroom setup into a shoebox) I live right next to train tracks lol
Holography. I dream of one day getting a quiet place to live with a huge walk-in closet to set up a darkroom in for holography. And once I get that I’ll start dreaming of getting my hands on a pulse laser
I work in a museum space. Any recommendations for implementing various forms of holography to create interesting exhibits?
The least temperamental kind to create and display are 540 nm (red) reflection holograms. To create, you get a laser pointer, gut it, turn it on for 15 minutes to let it stop doing funky diode stuff, set up your diorama behind the photo plate, and then shine the laser through the plate onto the diorama for however long your plate takes to develop. And to display it, you just need a point source of light, like a bright red LED.
Compare this with a green or blue hologram, which at the low end needs a high quality laser, a vibration-cancelling optical table, and even with all this can still be ruined by someone coughing in the other room. Or a transmission hologram, which at minimum needs a beam-splitter to create and must be displayed with the same color laser or the scale will be magnified or shrunk a bit, unless you are willing to make a rainbow hologram which also requires either an optical-grade cylindrical mirror/lens or some experimenting with paper slits, followed by a second pass through projecting the master print on the rainbow print.
I’m skipping a lot of details on the setup, but you get the gist. This all being said, the coolest holograms are rainbow holos
Sounds pretty involved, but I might have to experiment with this. Thanks for the info! I’m going to start researching a bit more, and see if I can squeeze some R&D funds from work.
Good luck! Like I said earlier, this is all pretty aspirational for me since I don’t have a good space to do any of this and likely will not in the near future either. Even if I go with the shoebox method (use fibre-optic cables to compress the darkroom setup into a shoebox) I live right next to train tracks lol
These are the types of hobbies I can get behind! Update me/us in the future whenever you create anything cool. That’s the type of content Lemmy needs!