The Image King

At first, Roger Holden's amazing invention looked like — and at one time probably was — an upright video-game console, the kind that used to house Galaga or Ms. Pac-Man at mall arcades.

When Holden turned on the power, a ghostly sphere appeared in the air over its tilted, waist-high screen. The sphere hovered above the screen, fully dimensional but not quite substantial, real and not real. Holden called it a "construction of light," one so real that you couldn't help reaching out to touch it — but nothing was there.

That was four years ago.

These days, when Holden powers up his latest invention — he's finishing a patent application for the new technology, which is the size of a small DVD player and sits on the floor of his downtown Lawrence office — a three-dimensional image of a Star Wars imperial fighter, oddly red, materializes in space a few inches above it. The fighter isn't large, perhaps 3 inches by 4 inches, and, of course, the color is all wrong, and it isn't really doing anything special, just hanging there ... just hanging there in space ... a three-dimensional image suspended in space.

The fighter immediately calls to mind the scene from Star Wars in which R2D2 projects a hologram — a shimmery, three-dimensional image in the air — of Carrie Fisher's Princess Leia making her classic plea, "Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You're my only hope." The resemblance is more than casual. Holden was a member of the massive and utterly bedazzled audience for that landmark film. He credits the scene as part of his inspiration.

In 1977, the image beaming from R2D2's head was as marvelous as the film's light sabers and space dogfights, just one more example of George Lucas' prodigious imagination. But today, Roger Holden intends to make 3-D image projection commonplace.

His original technology will soon be on the market, and it could radically change, forever, entertainment and telecommunications and who knows how many other industries.

"My main goal is to create a revolutionary holographic visual-display technology that will sweep the globe and become a multibillion-dollar industry," Holden says. "Aim for the stars and you might at least hit a planet."

Holden, who favors Hawaiian shirts and a fisherman's cap, has aimed high several times in the past and hit at least the moon.

In the early 1980s, he invented a computerized camera-control system that producers used to animate the first five seasons of Reading Rainbow, the long-running PBS children's series.

He did the work at Centron Productions, the commercial production house that for many years was the foundation of Lawrence's film community. Centron's 1950s black-and-white educational shorts (Why Study Home Economics?; Fire Safety Is Your Problem) were common classroom materials for young baby boomers, and years later some of the films enjoyed second lives as on-screen "experiments" on Mystery Science Theater 3000. Centron also produced hundreds of commercial and industrial films for a long list of Fortune 500 companies. Leo Beuerman, its 1969 documentary short about a fiercely independent disabled man who sold pencils on Massachusetts Street, was nominated for an Academy Award. The Reading Rainbowcontract called for the company to produce seven-minute animated "feature book" segments that would be narrated by celebrities such as Bill Cosby and Gilda Radner.

"The one thing I am proudest of in my life is being a central pioneer on Reading Rainbow," Holden tells the Pitch. The system he invented for the show, a then-revolutionary combination of an Atari 800 personal computer and an immense $40,000 Oxberry animation camera, robotized the animation photography process, permitting precise camera movements in a little more than half the time required for manual adjustments. It worked superbly, but it was also a complicated magnetic-tape system that required stacks of expensive, then-exotic technology.

Holden's newest device is different. It's conceptually simple. Holden estimates that the materials in the machine on his office floor cost three dollars. He's been working on 3-D image projection for a decade — and not alone.

"Roger had the concept and asked me if I could build it," says Robert Babcock, who co-invented the original technology. "It was completely experimental. I built a little apparatus that held mirrors in arbitrary positions and started making adjustments. ... I made adjustment after adjustment after adjustment. I still remember the night I projected an image for the first time. Wow, it works!"

Babcock pays the bills as a Lawrence firefighter and EMT, but he's a lifelong animation aficionado — "Animation is life, the rest is details," he says — with a background in metalsmithing and graphic design. Soon after Holden developed the Reading Rainbow technology, Babcock walked through the door of Magic Visions (at the time Holden's film and animation production shop) with a portfolio of drawings. Holden fired up the Oxberry on the spot and put Babcock to work on "The Baron Waste," a three-minute pilot for an animated children's show with an environmental theme. The two of them completed it in three weeks. They have collaborated ever since.

"He's intense," Babcock says of Holden. "He's very intense."

Holden's bookshelves hold such titles as Higher Mathematics, Robots and Robotology, Conjurers' Optical Secrets, Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah and a Carnival of Souls comic book. Barbarella decorates his office, as does Holden's digital portrait of Louise Brooks, the silent-era bombshell from Cherryvale, Kansas, who inspired a generation of women to bob their hair. His usual manner is reserved, even reticent, but he brightens when talk turns to music and film. He has produced paintings, albums, animated films and videos, and he'll pull out examples of all of them, carefully describing the production history of each work and the audience it reached.