[ma2t]

One of the things I appreciate about HN is that discussions often acknowledges the pioneers. Way back in the early 1990s Eric Begleiter started Dimensional Foods to commercialize edible holographic technology. He gave a memorable demo at Thinking Machines Corp. where, in addition to rainbows from diffraction sheet molded foods, he showed some simple rendered 3D scenes floating in chocolate illuminated by a slide projector. Very impressive at the time when he broke off a chunk and ate it. The short-term idea was to give a rainbow sheen to breakfast cereals, but I think longer term there was talk of using holograms to distinguish and layer information on medicines. Made quite an impression at the time.

https://web.archive.org/web/20150527050715/https://www.nytim...

[flir]

I tried this in the early 90s off the back of a short article in Scientific American about chocolate holograms which was almost certainly about the same company. It worked, and I think it would have worked a lot better if I knew more about tempering chocolate.

It struck me at the time that using holographic foil as a mould would be the natural next step.

I've got a vague memory of a chocolate record being made as an art project? The needle abraded the surface so it wasn't really playable more than once.

[rgovostes]

Samy Kamkar, a computer security researcher whose work is discussed on this site, generated some coverage with his iridescent chocolate a few years ago. But the article and HN comments point to prior art.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23128379

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/21/science/chocolate-irisdes...

[IncreasePosts]

If you don't mind me asking - what were you up to at Thinking Machines at the time?