Projects
Holograms for capturing solar energy
Photovoltaic (PV) cells
Manufacturers of PV technology are continuously looking to improve the efficiency of their cells. By using either reflective (i.e. bounced back to a point above) or diffractive (passed through) holograms, sunlight can be captured more effectively. This can be applied to reduce the size of the cell required, or to focus more sunlight energy irrespective of where the sun is in the sky. You can also spectrally select the more efficient wavelengths, and discard those you don’t need.
Concentrated Solar Power (CSP)
The traditional solutions for CSP have involved multiple mirrors that focus sunlight/heat onto a trough or tower. Both require expensive and complicated tracking machinery to keep the mirrors at the correct angle to reflect the sun as it moves across the sky. View Holographics solution is to replace these mirrors with static reflective holograms that are designed to ensure that any sunlight from any angle at any time of day will be focussed onto the same point or location. This means you don’t need any expensive tracking machinery thus reducing cost and improving efficiency.
View Holographics is developing new materials and manufacturing technology to produce these holograms in volume at low cost/high quality.
Holographic LCD screen reflectors
Handheld portable devices - such as mobile ‘phones, MP3 players or digital cameras - have screens that are very often difficult to look at outdoors or in bright light conditions due to glare and reflection. The usual solution to this is to incorporate a backlight within the screen’s LCD “sandwich”. Often this doesn’t solve the problem, and also has the disadvantage of requiring power which very quickly drains a battery.
By using a “passive” hologram sitting behind the LCD, however, it is possible to use the ambient light to efficiently illuminate the display. This is achieved by using the hologram to alter the angles of the light arriving from either the sun or other light sources so that the brightest reflection exits the LCD directly to the viewer of the screen. This technique is passive and consumes no battery power. Although holograms have been considered before to solve this problem, they have been single colour and difficult to manufacture in high quality/low volume. View Holographics is developing new materials and manufacturing technology which will provide a pure white light holographic reflector which can be produced in volume at low cost/high quality.
Holoshot
View Holographics owns a camera recording apparatus known as holoshot which enables us to capture a series of images of live subjects and turn them into an animated hologram. The holoshot camera runs along a rail and captures a large number of images from a wide range of different angles. These images are then collated using specialist software and output to a format that allows us to create a hologram.
Perfect for images of sports stars, celebrities or a family photo with a difference!
