Hologram Industry News

With the Motor Vehicles Department (MVD) enforcing the directive to install speed governors in all heavy vehicles plying in the Kerala before April 15, forgery of holograms and invoices of the speed governors and tampering of the MVD seal in the gadgets are becoming rampant.
There have been instances of even the speed governor being removed from one heavy vehicle and installed in another vehicle to obtain the Certificate of Fitness (CF) from the MVD. A mechanic of a workshop who dismantled the gadget and installed it in another vehicle was arrested in Attingal recently.

Once just a sticker collector’s novelty, holograms are taking on a whole new dimension. These new digital 3-D hologram images may be the key to inventing new cars, designing buildings, and mapping entire cities!
Showing perfect views of every dashboard, every hallway, and every city street, holograms can now be used by police, city planners and car makers.
“The hologram is a more direct way to get exactly what is in the design visualized prior to committing to build the car itself,” Michael Klug, founder of Zebra Imaging in Austin, Texas, tells Ivanhoe.
He says that pre-production saves car makers time and money, savings that trickle down to you. “There’s no question it can save the car companies and the consumers money, and it’s not just money straightaway. It’s also time, which is money as we know.”
Source:Â http://www.ivanhoe.com/science/story/2006/05/142a.html

There have been some news reports in the South Indian media about some colour television sets with holograms carrying the government emblem, which have found their way into the open market in Tirunelveli district.
Obviously, some corrupt officials who were responsible for the distribution of these CTV sets for free amongst the intended recipients must have filed falsified reports and sold them off to some black marketers at throw-away prices for a profit.Once again, holograms have brought the issue of illegal product distribution to light.

Applications are now being invited for the Excellence in Holography Awards 2007. Held by the IHMA and sponsored by Holography News, the awards are presented in recognition of outstanding innovations in holography which offer major commercial benefits to the producers and their customers. In the 14 years since they were established, these annual awards have recognised many of the groundbreaking developments within the holographic industry.
As in previous years, the awards cover all different types of holographic technology and there will be six categories for hologram manufacturers to compete within - authentication and hologram security, packaging, promotion/illustration and industrial (a new category introduced last year), along with Best New Product and Best New Technique. From these and the other categories one winner will be chosen for the Best of the Year Award. Last year this achievement was won by Hologram Industries, University of Liège Hololab and Lucimed for Luminette® spectacles which are used for phototherapy (the therapeutic use of light to correct disorders based on light deficiency) and which contain holographic optical elements to focus light into patients’ eyes.

Holograms are increasingly being used for the forgery-proof labelling of expensive branded articles. Australian company, Sick is presenting a scanner at the Hanover Trade Fair that detects holograms during attachment to the packaging, or for subsequent inspection of authenticity.
AÂ hologram scanner includes a rotatable hologram disk on which a plurality of hologram lenses are arranged circumferentially, and a light beam guide mechanism for successively shifting irradiation regions in a predetermined direction with respect to the direction of rotation of the hologram disk, to apply a light beam successively to the hologram lenses on the hologram disk, so that the scanning of a reading window with the light beam is effected in all directions with high density. The hologram scanner is employable as a bar code reading device in a POS or UPC system.
Source: http://www.ferret.com.au/articles/z1/view.asp?id=36112