Chris Rich – at the Wavefront of Holography for 35 Years

After the initial wave of commercial applications of holography in the early 1980s (see: https://ihma.org/milestones) the holographic industry, at least for transfer films and labels, was spread across four distinct areas of competence: origination, mass-production, converting and application & finishing. As applications for holography became broader, the need for a fifth set of equipment and know-how arose: transferring the master hologram into a format ready for mass-production.

This need, for what might be called pre-production, led to the rise of new companies entering the holography eco-system. One of these companies was WaveFront Technology (www.wftinc.com), founded by Chris Rich and Joel Petersen in Los Angeles in 1986, that offered a service to take in a master hologram (either image or pattern), tessellate the image through a step and repeat process (recombining) and then prepare the shims, ready for replication.