Holography and Volumetric displays

[Zakalwe]

While randomly looking around Wikipedia for descriptions of how holograms might work (given that I was going to use one on some of my new tech), I can across this interesting paragraph:

Holography (from the Greek, Όλος-holos whole + γραφή-graphe writing) is the science of producing holograms; it is an advanced form of photography that allows an image to be recorded in three dimensions. The technique of holography can also be used to optically store, retrieve, and process information. It is common to confuse volumetric displays with holograms, particularly in science-fiction works such as Star Trek, Star Wars, Red Dwarf, and Quantum Leap.

The importance of this is that although we here use hologram's as a form of 3D projection, it seems that this is not the case. These are in fact 'Volumetric displays'. I'm a little fuzzy on the difference, but it seems that Holography would be effectively making a 3D photograph, and some how storing an image in three dimensions. Volumetric displays are in fact an image which is 'projected', and takes up three dimensions, creating an illusion of a solid object, and as such what we are far more used to thinking of as 'holograms'.

As such, I myself am now using the term 'Volumetric displays' and 'Volumetric display projectors' instead of 'Holograms' and 'Holographic projectors', and I suggest that if we are going to be technically correct we might all want to do this.

Or you can stick to the Sci-Fi principle of calling them Holograms.

Here's a link to Volumetric displays anyway:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volumetric_display

 

[Ametheliana]

There are no replies on this topic, but it greatly changed the way volumetrics are talked about on this site, I assume. Thanks for catching this, @Zakalwe! I think it really helped the site!