Applied Holography in Cultural Heritage

Being active in a country with a unique cultural tradition of worldwide influence extending from Classical Ancient Greece to Orthodox Byzantium Christianity, the use of display holography in the preservation, recording and public visual dissemination of artifact items from this cultural heritage has been at the core and forefront of the activities of the Hellenic Institute of Holography.

Technological progress in various disciplines such as solid-state lasers, panchromatic emulsions, digital photography, computational capabilities, LED illumination etc. allow for the first time the use of realistic display holography in cultural heritage in a practical and tangible manner. This has in turn resulted in renewed interest in applications of display holography for Museums and worldwide activities in this sphere have ensued.

 
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This is the term of an ambitious program set out by the Hellenic Institute of Holography for the use of display holography in applications related to cultural heritage. During Phase I, the necessary (trans)portable equipment, processes and software for the in-situ recording of artifacts and their subsequent interpretation in either analog or digital display holograms have been developed.

The program has entered since Nov2011 in Phase II where experimental work is done by using different materials for producing display holograms of acceptable standard by the prospective end-users. The preliminary results from this comparative R&D work using materials and processes from various sources has been compiled into a scientific paper and was presented at the 9th Int'l Symposium of Display Holography (ISDH2012) held at the MIT Media Lab in Boston USA.

Phase III of this program is already in seed preparation with discussions for pilot application projects involving established international holographic players with proven track of work in the area of display holography for cultural heritage. Announcements will be made in due course but the use of Display Holography in recording Religious Artifacts is the present direction of one of these trans-national cooperation projects.