Making holograms with a pen plotter

(blog.jordan.matelsky.com)

118 points | by DemiGuru 7 hours ago ago

12 comments

  • dejobaan 7 hours ago 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 4 hours ago 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.

    • TacticalCoder 6 hours ago ago

      There are very few TFAs I upvotes before opening TFA. But with such a title, this is one of them...

  • nomel 7 hours ago 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 6 hours ago ago

      Something tells me you didn't open the posted link.

      • nomel 4 hours ago ago

        I guess I don't know how sharp a pick with an orange handle is from harbor freight, compared to a needle.

    • bradrn 6 hours ago 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 4 hours ago 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 4 hours ago ago

          Ah, whoops, thanks!

  • asalahli 5 hours ago ago

    Steve Mould has a great video on youtube explaining how they work https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sv-38lwV6vc

  • femto 3 hours ago 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_...

  • IshKebab 16 minutes ago ago

    I've made these scratch holograms before with a compass. They're pretty fun, but very far from "real" holograms.