When mass-printed holograms appeared on magazines in the 1980s they were a huge novelty, before degrading to the level of kids’ stickers in the years since. At the time they were seen as not for ordinary people to make, but the truth is they can be created without lasers or an optics lab. [Jordan Matelsky] is here to show us how they can be made using as humble a device as a pen plotter.

The effect of an interference pattern from a set of fine lines in a thin film can be demonstrated at its simplest with an oily finger and a mobile phone screen, and once he’s demonstrated that he takes us through some of the theory involved in shifting the light to make an image. There are some false starts with different materials, but eventually he shows us some finished holograms scribed on the polycarbonate of a CD case. It seems you really can make a hologram with a pen plotter. If these images interest you, we’ve looked deeper into the subject in the past. Meanwhile, one of the plotter-scribed holograms can be seen below.