At my high school, in the 1970s, I did a bit of holograph making as an extra-curricular activity, using a kit from Edmunds Scientific. Edmunds was, AFAICT a much better source for the science hobbyist then than it is now
. I bought nearly all the glass blanks, abrasives, pitch, and hardware for a hand-made 6” reflector I made in HS there.
In college, one of the professors at a neighboring university was very interested in holography, and ran an “open lab” on weekends. It wasn’t hands on, but a small seated audience watching the activities, followed by a short lecture and Q & A.
When last I left the subject, making holograms of recognizable objects required a lot of specialized gear outside of the grasp of most hobbyists, such as air-ride vibration isolation tables and then-expensive lasers. Johnfp, I gather, has put together his own private collection of this gear, and impressive feat.
In a quick search to confirm that Edmunds no longer carries the holograph kit I remember from my youth, I found
“Shoebox Holography”, a 128-page book that explains how to make holographs using inexpensive laser pointers. John, I’m curious to know your opinion of this book – do you have it? have you seen/read it? do you think a person could learn much using only a shoebox size kit?
In the early 1990s, I recall a lot of commercial interest in holography. A major company, Atari, I recall, made an arcade game in which you peered into a dark enclosure at a small moving image, which could be controlled,
Dragon’s Lair fashion, in a sort of video game. Neither I nor anybody of my acquaintance could make much sense of the game. The “holy grail” of these activities were computer-driven “electro-holography -- capable of producing realistic 3-D holographic images in real time”. The best reference to this activity I know is
The Holovideo Page by Mark Lucente.
One of a long lines of incorrect predictions,
I forecast in the early 1990s that by the turn of the century, most consumer display devices (ie: TVs) would be capable of rendering holographs via technology derived from the above early research. To my surprise, even 8 years into the new millennium, this isn’t the case. The reason, I suspect, is less technical than economic – despite what seems to me the obvious appeal of real, full-wavefront 3-D images, which that can be examined from many angles, the market simply hasn’t demanded or responded positively to early offerings of such things. Even a what-seems-to-me highly feasible device like picture frames with concealed illumination lasers for a high-quality, multi-color photographic holograph (vs. the unimpressive white-light illuminated holographs common on credit cards and cereal box prizes) don’t appear in any marketplace of which I’m aware, even though I can imagine mall kiosks doing a good business with them. Markets are difficult to predict.
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Why so little holography in the marketplace? 
