Making holograms with a pen plotter

(jordan.matelsky.com)

177 points | by DemiGuru 22 hours ago

10 comments

  • stenl 9 hours ago
    Related: ”Self Reflected” by neuroscientist and artist Gregg Dunn, https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/self-reflected-a-giant-...

    He uses the third dimension to encode time, so that you get an image of the brain that illustrates how signals propagate dynamically between brain regions.

    I have a version of this on my wall and its mesmerizing to look at with the right lighting conditions

    • srean 7 hours ago
      Beautiful. This needs to be an HN post on its own. Please post. I will upvote.
    • j6m8 3 hours ago
      omg that rocks
  • dejobaan 21 hours ago
    This is "old Internet" style fun territory (along the same lines as the Tom7 fun, if not quite as deep). I felt that the olive oil + fingerprint + phone screen was a really nice way to illustrate the core concept. Especially clever because it used something common and annoying to help describe how the plotter does its thing.
    • radarsat1 18 hours ago
      Before getting further into the article I thought maybe he was going to show how to use the plotter to control the oil smearing technique, which honestly would have been kind of cool.
      • j6m8 3 hours ago
        author here — the second I did that, I considered handing it to the robot. but ... robot with oil in my living room... I decided against it :)
    • j6m8 3 hours ago
      thank you so much for the kind words!!
    • TacticalCoder 21 hours ago
      There are very few TFAs I upvotes before opening TFA. But with such a title, this is one of them...
  • nomel 21 hours ago
    Related, "abrasion holography", with great good success for being hand drawn: http://amasci.com/amateur/holo1.html (1995)

    Maybe could swap out the pen for a needle?

    • evilduck 20 hours ago
      Something tells me you didn't open the posted link.
      • nomel 18 hours ago
        I guess I don't know how sharp a pick with an orange handle is from harbor freight, compared to a needle.
        • j6m8 3 hours ago
          less!
    • bradrn 20 hours ago
      In fact, I believe that the article is describing a reinvention of this technique! Just with a plotter on oil rather than a compass on plastic.
      • Sardtok 18 hours ago
        He did it on plastic CD cases, not oil. The oil in the beginning of the article was just for explaining the refraction that happens with the ridges in the structure.
        • bradrn 18 hours ago
          Ah, whoops, thanks!
  • auscad 10 hours ago
    Holography is such a beautiful and fascinating gateway to physics, and it’s so rare to see true demonstrations of it. Sadly, most people have no idea what it is because of how carelessly the term is thrown around, just like in this article. At least the author admits it and provides some kind of excuse, even if it’s at the end.
  • asalahli 20 hours ago
    Steve Mould has a great video on youtube explaining how they work https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sv-38lwV6vc
  • femto 17 hours ago
    It would be interesting to augment the plotter with a Unimorph piezoelectric disk scanner [1], to enable finer movement so lines can be drawn closer together.

    [1] https://john-alexander42.github.io/simple-stm-web-page/Disk_...

    • j6m8 3 hours ago
      interesting! the axidraw v3 that I used for this (https://shop.evilmadscientist.com/productsmenu/846) has a 0.0125mm stepper resolution, which means that it is pretty close to not-worth-it to go any finer since the sizes of the scratches are already many microns wide. But certainly with better etching technology that would be a super cool update!
  • bacon_waffle 14 hours ago
    Chocolate is a good medium for holograms :)
  • 6510 12 hours ago
    William Beaty had a video of the hands on the car hood. They showed up very detailed some 20 cm under the hood as if people captured inside. Quite the find.
  • IshKebab 15 hours ago
    I've made these scratch holograms before with a compass. They're pretty fun, but very far from "real" holograms.
  • mewens 10 hours ago
    [flagged]