<img src="http://www.discover.com/feb_02/images/photo6.jpg" class="frame" align="left"><a href="http://www.discover.com/feb_02/featphoto.html">The Hologram Revolution</a> in the February 2002 <a href="http://www.discover.com/">Discover Magazine</a> (halfway down the page) reports on a new technique pioneered by a Frenchman, Yves Gentet, that produces the most stunning, realistic, high-resolution holograms you've ever seen. It's a pity they included only the small picture, because the larger one in the magazine is impressive. In the smaller one here, you can, to some degree, see the depth that is represented in the hologram, and you can kind of see that the frame is no thicker than a picture's. The detail in the larger picture is equal to that of a photograph. Briefly, holograms work by recording more information about a scene than a 2-D camera, namely the angle of incidence of the reflected light: <span class="quote"><q>Every light wave has three properties. It has an intensity determined by the height of its crests. It has a color determined by the distance between crests—the wavelength. And it has a direction of travel. Daguerreotypes and black-and-white photographs record only variations in intensity; color photographs record variations in wavelengths too. But holograms alone capture light's third property. By recording the direction that light waves travel as they bounce off an object, holograms let us see that object in three dimensions.</q></span> His process produces a film surface with 10 to 100 times the resolution of ordinary film, while still recording the direction of the light as well. The article goes on to mention that mass production could be coming soon: <span class="quote"><q>Gentet has found an American partner who has the machinery to copy an Ultimate master onto a polymer made by DuPont. For reasons Gentet doesn't fully understand, the results, though not of Ultimate standards, are far superior than if the polymer were used to record the hologram in the first place. The DuPont copies can already be cranked out on an industrial scale, and the same may soon be possible with Ultimate itself.</q></span>