This composite picture shows a sequence of images (at top) illustrates a typical manipulation of a 3D holographic image as the user changes both the form and position in a fraction of a second. The lower portion of the picture shows part of the holovideo display system and a viewer interacting with a small 3-D image. The holographic fringe pattern use to create the interactive images contained 2 MB of information each, and was computed on a massively parallel supercomputer (a Connection Machine Model 2 with 16 Kprocessors). A time-multiplexed scanned acousto-optic modulator transfers the fringe pattern onto a beam of light at a rate of over 100 MB/s. Professor Stephen A. Benton is shown interacting with the system.
This photo is used courtesy of Scientific American.