New Light Industries Ltd., an 8-year-old West Plains company that develops holography equipment, says it might be just a year or two away from completing development of a device that could be used to produce holographic portraits of people for drivers licenses and other identification cards.


Development of the device, called a holocomposer, has been under way for several years, funded partly by research grants from the National Science Foundation. New Light, which is owned by holographic pioneer and Spokane-area native Steve McGrew, recently completed work fueled by the most recent of those grants, called a Phase IIB Small Business Innovative Research grant, and now hopes to refine its experimental device for commercial marketability.


That process, says McGrew, will require finding ways to make the device small enough to fit on a licensing bureau countertop, and inexpensive enoughsay $10,000 to $25,000 eachto be a viable purchase for agencies that issue such licenses. He says the task of taking the device to market likely will be too expensive for New Light to handle alone, and the West Plains company, which employs just five people, is looking for a larger company with which to partner on the project.


The ID-card market, says McGrew, is huge, estimated by some to be $5 billion annually.


The device, which would produce three-dimensional images, could provide government agencies with drivers licenses or other forms of ID that would be much more difficult to counterfeit than conventional cards that use Polaroid-like photos of the licensee.


The holocomposer is groundbreaking, he says, in that it uses technology capable of producing a holographic portrait in less than two minutes, and in environments, such as on a countertop or desktop, that are far less controlled than the vibration-free platforms on which most holograms currently are produced.


New Light collaborated on the project with researchers in the former Soviet republic of Moldavia, who came up with an instantly developing, chemical-free recording medium for the holographic portraits.


The holocomposer would take a portrait using either several cameras that would take shots from different angles simultaneously, or a video-like camera that moves in an arc in front of the subjects face, recording images from a multitude of angles.


Either method would produce the kinds of views needed to created a 3-D image.


The digital information from the collected images would be processed using sophisticated software, which would be used to produce a holographic portrait the size of a drivers license photo.


Mastering services


Separately, New Light Industries has begun offering holographic mastering services, using a device it developed and now markets to other companies on a limited basis. Holographic masters are made for the mass production of like-image holograms, such as those found on major credit cards.


There are only about 20 or 30 companies capable of making such masters, and mass producers of holograms pay up $3,000 to $10,000 to have a master made, depending on its complexity. New Light is marketing that service to such mass producers, and meanwhile is marketing the image setters it developed that produce holographic masters.


New Light developed two such machines, an HI-600 and an HI-1200. So far, it has sold only one, an HI-600, to Light Impressions International Ltd., a British hologram producer owned partly by McGrew.


The HI-600 sells for $125,000. The HI-1200 is capable of producing much more sophisticated holograms that would be used where security is of great importance.


New Light expects to put those devices in the hands of only a select group of customers that it believes are legitimate security printers, and, rather than selling them, probably will license their use, charging a $250,000 upfront fee plus regular royalties.


Other projects


New Light also has built what it calls a UV (ultraviolet) embosser, which can be used to mass produce holograms and other similar, laser produced images. That device, built in a lab at Eastern Washington University, currently is in Green Bay, Wisc., where its being tested by a California high-tech company that plans to use it to produce a floppy version of a CD-ROM disk, rather than holograms, McGrew says. He declines to disclose the name of the company, but says the venture hopes to market the production of CD-ROM disks that are made of a flexible film and are extremely inexpensive to mass produce.


It wasnt what we intended for this machine, but it works, McGrew says. They (the disks) play just fine.


He says that for now, New Light likely will license use of the UV embosser to the California company, but later could produce similar machines for companies that mass produce holograms. Depending on their size and sophistication, those machines could sell for as much as $1.5 million, he says.


New Light, which is located just west of the Boeing Co. plant on U.S. 2, also is working on a hologram reading device, which eventually could be used as a security tool to authenticate credit cards at retail locations.


Because holograms now can be counterfeited quite easily, the industry is producing new holograms, such as the ones mastered with the HI-1200, that are nearly impossible to counterfeit. The problem is, however, that even a trained hologram expert may not be able to discern whether a hologram is a counterfeit simply by looking at it.


To remedy that, New Light wants to incorporate a specialized hologram reader into the magnetic card swipes that merchants use when they process credit-card purchases.


The reader would be able to spot a counterfeit, and notify the store clerk instantly, McGrew says.


In countries where the currency carries a hologramabout 35 countries currentlyanother version of such a reader might be used to spot counterfeit cash quickly, he says.


New Light has built several test prototypes of the reader, but commercial versions still are being developed, McGrew says.


New Lights ability to analyze information quickly, as its software does in a hologram reader, also won it a grant from the U.S. Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, which was seeking help in developing systems that would help it identify warheads among a barrage of decoy missiles, McGrew says.


Under some scenarios of missile attack, an enemy would launch a host of missiles in a cluster, with only one being a real warhead and the others being decoys. The U.S. military, using its Patriot missile system, wouldnt have time to shoot down all the missiles before the armed one struck its intended target, so it needs to concentrate on the real one, letting the decoys fall harmlessly, McGrew says. In the research grant, which concluded about a year ago, New Light found ways it could use its own algorithm software and some very high-speed computer chips to sort out, in seconds, the decoys from the real missiles in a combat situation.