Wet Lens Makes Faster Holograms

Holography has long tantalised scientists and engineers with its promise of creating immersive, lifelike 3D representations of real scenes.

In truth, this vision has been hampered by the large amount of data inherent in 3D scenes and the stringent requirements of spatial coherence of any light source used to illuminate the scene. These obstacles have resulted in slow capture rates for real 3D scenes, added to which is the issue of speckle noise degrading the holographically reproduced images.

In a new paper, recently published in Light: Science & Applications ¹, a team of researchers led by Prof Qiong-Hua Wang from Beihang University in China, along with Profs Song-Lin Zhuang and Da-Wei Zhang from the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, have made significant strides in overcoming these hurdles. Their collaborative efforts have culminated in the development of a new holographic camera capable of swiftly acquiring high-quality holograms of realworld 3D scenes, all within the remarkable time of just 150 milliseconds.