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by Animats 3552 days ago
There's a small company in Austin, Zebra Imaging, which generates CG holograms on big pieces of photographic film.[1] Those are real holograms. The military buys them as 3D models in a flat, portable form, and they're sometimes used in place of architectural models. Some people still take photographic holograms using a big flash laser. (This was a thing about 40 years ago. One guy still does it.) Almost everything else called a "hologram" is about as fake as a "hoverboard".

Someday someone may make a display with light-wavelength-scale resolution and display real holograms in real time, but that hasn't been done yet.

[1] http://www.zebraimaging.com/

2 comments

I found this interesting. Too bad the prints are like $250/$500 each depending on whether they are monochrome or color. Wasn't easy to find out either, what with their expired webshop domains and all.
They look pretty good with the right lighting, but objects must never be clipped by the papers edge. So you have to keep your 3d inside an imaginary pyramid on top of the medium.
That's just a question of how wide the paper is.
Practically: if the paper is wider, it will probably lower your viewing angle and that stuff is expensive!