Then and Now – Rummaging Through the HN Archives

Reconnaissance International has embarked on a major exercise to archive the back catalogue of Holography News®. The task, which is nearing completion, was to add digitised versions of the paper publications for the years 1987-2003 (for which we are indebted to Prof Hans Bjelkhagen for the loan of his library of HN newsletters) to the existing digital versions of later years that had been collated by former editor, Ian Lancaster.

Nowadays, the newsletter is created, published and archived electronically so that it is easily searchable. But reading through the scanned versions of back issues has the unexpected advantage of serendipity – stumbling upon events in holography as if they were unfolding in real time. More interestingly though, are the number of stories that were reported three decades ago that are still echoing to this day.

With this in mind, we will be running a periodic series of Then and Now, digging into the archives and bringing some of those earliest inventions and breakthrough into the present day.

The birth of holographic HUDs

This month, I have been rummaging through the year 1988 and learnt that in May of that year automotive giant General Motors (GM) announced that it was moving rapidly towards the introduction of head up displays (HUDs) into their production models. The motor company showed off its first production model with a HUD – the Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme – as the official pace car in the Memorial Day Indianapolis 500 race.

The car was equipped with a HUD which displays key driving data including speed in a virtual visual location near the car’s front bumper, so that the driver did not need to divert their eyes from the road environment to view the information. Ordinarily the data would be shown on the instrument panel on what was called a heads-down display (HDD).

The system was developed jointly by a GM team from Hughes aircraft and Delco Electronics (subsidiaries of GM Hughes Electronics), Oldsmobile and Chevrolet- Pontiac, Canada.

To this day, GM continues to pioneer the use of holography in the automotive sector and in March of this year contributed to series C funding for Envisics, a tech startup working in the field of automotive HUDs. GM has been a long-time investor in the project, and will debut Envisic’s second generation augmented reality HUD on the 2024 Cadillac Lyriq. Construction of the vehicle is expected to begin this month, with a possible launch date set for late 2023.

With the latest iteration of its holographic HUD, Envisics has implemented new augmented reality features, allowing graphics to overlay the driver’s point of view. In addition to seeing their route projected over the highway in real-time, users will also have a clearer view of pedestrians and other vehicles through object tracking and identification.

Although this is a significant advance on the information made available to the driver of the Cutlass Supreme in 1988, the basic rationale for HUDs, as opposed to HDDs, remains the same – since the HUD is at eye-level, drivers do not have to take their eyes off the road to view their dashboard, a potentially life-saving benefit.

The safety element was a critical factor for the development of holographic HUDs back in 1988. Nissan, for example, had performed extensive tests involving dual object identification tasks in which subjects were asked to identify objects and display data in short periods of time. Uniformly, the subjects performed better with HUDs than with HDDs. In a paper given to the Eleventh International Technical Conference on Experimental Safety Vehicles in 1987, the company reported: ‘as safe driving requires nearly simultaneous recognition of display information and the forward view, HUDs can bring great improvements in driving safely, especially at high speeds.’

1st application for banknotes

A small entry in the same edition of HN chronicled the beginning of what has since become the single largest commercial application for holography of all time. It reads ‘Australia is the first country to use holography on its currency. The country’s Reserve Bank introduced a test run of 350,000 bills during January and is now introducing them into general circulation. The plastic bills contain a hologram of Captain Cooke, the eighteenth-century seafarer who claimed Australia for the British, in the corner of the note surrounded by a clear space. The bills are being produced by the Reserve Bank itself. After further experience, the Bank may license the production technology to other governments and international currency printing companies.’ 

At the time, there was no way of predicting the impact that holography, and other diffractive optically variable image devices (DOVIDs), would have on the design of banknote security features. More on this in a future edition.

One thing that is very clear from reading the back issues is the openness with which company information that today would be called ‘commercially sensitive’ was shared with the newsletter. Perhaps this is due to the number of privately held companies that existed back then; publicly traded companies tend to shy away from sharing information that could ‘materially affect the share price’, or maybe it was simply a more naïve period in holography’s history. Either way, the disclosures that pepper the back catalogue of HN auger well for future episodes of this series.

For more insights into the history of holography visit the History section of the International Hologram Manufacturers Association (IHMA) website, https://ihma.org/milestones.