Holographic Imaging of Biological Samples
Wenhai Liu, Jose Mumbru, Demetri Psaltis

We are developing an imaging system with the ability of imaging a 3-D object plus its color spectrum information. The system makes use of the spatial and wavelength selectivity of volume holograms, which act as multiple focal-length lenses and color filters to separate 2-D slices with different color from the 3-D object into various detectors. The holographic microscope will be a powerful tool for imaging application in cell-biology, biochemistry, materials research and any other 3-D imaging application. (full report)

Gesture Recognition
George Panotopoulos, Dinkar Gupta, Demetri Psaltis, Pietro Perona

Though your personal computer has a processing capacity orders of magnitude larger than it did some ten years ago you still use the same means to interface with it, namely a keyboard and pointing device. In the context of this project we investigate the design of an interface based on human gestures. The system we are envisioning is not limited to a particular user and should be able to learn new gestures.
(full report)

Optically Programmable FPGA Systems
Jose Mumbru, George Panotopoulos, Arrigo Benedetti, Demetri Psaltis, Pietro Perona Industrial Collaborators: Holoplex, Honeywell, Photobit

The aim of this project is to investigate and demonstrate a Parallel Optical Interface between a Holographic Memory and a Silicon Circuit. This interface is implemented as an Optical Programmable Gate Array (OPGA), which is an enhanced version of a conventional FPGA, utilizing a holographic memory accessed by an array of VCSELs to program its logic. Combining spatial and shift multiplexing to store the configuration pages in the memory, the OPGA module is very compact and has extremely short configuration time allowing for dynamic reconfiguration. The reconfiguration capability of the OPGA can be applied to solve more efficiently problems in pattern recognition and searches in databases. The silicon hardware used for the OPGA can also be interfaced to a Holographic Disk Database and used for fast searches in the stored data.
(full report)

Fast Holographic Recording Using Angle Multiplexing
Zhiwen Liu, Gregory J. Steckman and Demetri Psaltis

We demonstrate a holographic system which can record nanosecond events. Five frames of laser induced shock wave propagation were recorded using this apparatus with a time resolution of 5.9ns and frame interval of 12ns.
(full report)