Transportable Studio for Holographic Recording

The Z-Lab is a fully transportable holographic laboratory consisting of mostly proprietary equipment for the analog holographic recording of objects of (mainly) cultural interest. Temporarily and for experimental purposes, it is hosted in a private building basement at Chalandri Athens, where we have already installed and operate the necessary technical equipment for the recording, processing, developing and finishing of full-colour OptoClones^© (analog Denisyuk-type holograms).

The basic set of equipment (Z3_System) has been put together by the Hellenic Institute of Holography with substantial self-finance and personal labour contributed by its members. It consists of the portable holographic camera Z3^RGB containing three solid-state RGB lasers together with the necessary optics which allow the exposure of objects of max size of 30x40cm under white laser light, of special proprietary setups for the stable and safe support of the objects to be shot and of an autonomous portable closed-circuit photographic dark room.

  As already pointed out, one of the key basic directives in developing this type of equipment has been its transportability in special protective travel cases so that it can be easily and safely transported for in-situ indoors holographic exposures according to the specifications of our original HoloCultura program. Moreover, it is worth mentioning that the holographic camera Z3^RGB model ZZZyclops designed and developed by the Hellenic Institute of Holography is the 2nd camera of such type in operation in the world, though the visual results already obtained by even its preliminary use easily place it in the forefront of international pioneering in display holography.

 With the use of this equipment, the full-colour analog holograms recorded on glass plates with special panchromatic emulsion coatings and further developed and finished by the experts of the HiH are unique in the sense that they represent the only realistic 3-dimensional recording of the objects; in essence they constitute but a visual 'freezing' in time and space of the electromagnetic frequencies emitted by the object in the visible spectre when illuminated with white laser light. These OptoClone^© holograms are visible under single-source white light and replay fully the natural colours, the surface structure, all minute details, the material nature and all visible properties of the original objects such as light reflections and shading. We are already in the position to obtain satisfactory results from the preliminary trial recordings of demanding objects such as metal wrist watches, ceramic vases, fabric masks, alabaster statuettes, religious hand-painted icons etc.), some of which were officially and publicly presented for the first time during the 9^th International Symposium of Display Holography held in June 2012 in MIT MediaLab whereas an impressive sample is exhibited at the MIT Museum in Boston USA until the end of Sep 2013.

During the course of the next few months, we intend to invite members and associates of the HiH for a full demonstration of the capabilities of the Z-Lab equipment in 'live' recording of objects and artefacts of cultural interest.