Holographic movies show promise for medical, military applications

I want my HTV!

In a small research laboratory at UT Southwestern Medical Center, a grainy, red movie of circling fighter jets emerges from a table-top black box, while nearby, a video of a rotating human heart hangs suspended in a tank of gooey gel.

These images - the first true, three-dimensional, holographic movies - are the brainchild of Dr. Harold "Skip" Garner, professor of biochemistry and internal medicine at UT Southwestern.
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In the long term, Dr. Garner said, entertainment uses could include 3-D multiplayer games, theme park or advertising displays, and "Holo TV." He and his colleagues have worked with students in Southern Methodist University's Cox School of Business to develop a tentative business plan that explores the possible commercialization of the technology, focusing on medical applications.
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Dr. Garner's holographic video system is based on complex optics principles, sophisticated computer programs, and a small computer chip covered with about a million tiny mirrors. He and his research team - Dr. Huebschman and computer programmer Bala Munjuluri - have published details of their system in several publications, including in the journal Optics Express in 2003. Dr. Garner's Web site contains technical details and sample holographic movies, at http://innovation.swmed.edu/research/instrumentation/res_inst_dev3d.html.

The heart of the holographic system is the digital light processing micro-mirror chip, made by Texas Instruments and currently used in television, video and movie projectors. Those devices incorporate a computer that processes an incoming digital signal by rapidly - several thousand times a second - changing the angle of each micro-mirror to reflect light from a regular light bulb. The resulting image is a two-dimensional video projected onto a screen.

One of Dr. Garner's innovations was to replace regular light with laser light. Such light is coherent, meaning it is made up of light of all one wavelength, with all light waves traveling "in phase" with one another. Light from a white light bulb comprises many different wavelengths that are out of phase.

Dr. Garner's system also requires a different kind of digital signal than those feeding into today's projection TV sets. His signal is a sequence of two-dimensional interference patterns, called interferograms, which can be generated either from scratch or from data gathered from 3-D imaging applications, such as sonograms, CAT scans, magnetic resonance imaging, radar, sonar or computer-aided drafting.