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Picture this: you're sat down for the Football World Cup final, or a long-awaited sequel to the "Sex and the City" movie and you're watching all the action unfold in 3-D on your coffee table.

The reason for renewed optimism in three-dimensional technology is a breakthrough in rewritable and erasable holographic systems made earlier this year by researchers at the University of Arizona.

Dr Nasser Peyghambarian, chair of photonics and lasers at the university's Optical Sciences department, told CNN that scientists have broken a barrier by making the first updatable three-dimensional displays with memory.

"This is a prerequisite for any type of moving holographic technology. The way it works presently is not suitable for 3-D images," he said.

Source: http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/10/06/holographic.television/index.html

Holography offers a way of creating complete 3-D images of samples, but requires mechanical scanning of laser beams. But two researchers have invented a new technology called FINCH (short for ‘Fresnel incoherent correlation holography.’

According to them, FINCH can make 3-D imaging quicker and more accurate. Their FINCHSCOPE, a 3-D microscope, promises to capture high-resolution 3-D fluorescent images of biological specimens without the need for any moving parts. It could be used in medical applications such as endoscopy, CT scanning or X-ray imaging, but also for security screening or 3-D movies.

Source: http://blogs.zdnet.com/emergingtech/?p=841

By using lasers to etch data onto fragments of a microbial protein, researchers at the University of Connecticut may have demonstrated a way to produce rewritable holographic memory. Holographic memory stores data in three dimensions instead of two and could make data retrieval hundreds of times faster. The first holographic-memory systems have recently come to market, but they do not yet feature discs rewritable in real time.

Researchers at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, led by Jeffrey Stuart, head of the university's Nanobionics Research Center, based their holographic storage system on reengineered versions of proteins produced by bacteria-like organisms commonly found in salt marshes. Simply shining blue light on the proteins erases any data stored in them.

The technology exploits an evolutionary adaptation of the microbe Halobacterium salinarum, which produces a light-sensitive membrane protein when concentrations of oxygen get too low. The protein, known as bacteriorhodopsin, helps the organism convert sunlight into energy. After the protein absorbs light, it cycles through a series of chemical states, releases a proton, and finally resets itself.

Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19228/?a=f

XYZ Imaging Inc. is the world’s first holographic printing bureau capable of creating production ready multi-resolution, full color, reflective holograms from pure digital media. This technology uses patented holographic technology developed over a 6 year timeframe at a cost of nearly $ 23 Million US dollars.

Combined with a revolutionary emulsion that is more than 300 times finer than ISO 300 film on a super wide format that measures over 1 m wide, allowing for the production of never-before-seen large format holographic prints with a single sheet size of: 1m wide x 1.2m long or longer (based on the length of the film roll).

Source: http://www.xyzimaging.com/