When the two meet, the interference pattern produced, if captured on photographic film, has the ability to change a new reference beam into a new object beam.

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When the reflected object beam and the reference beam are recombined, they create an interference pattern that encodes the 3-D image.

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To create a hologram, such as those typically seen on credit cards, a laser beam is split into two (an object beam and a reference beam).

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Holograms are interference patterns generated by the interaction of a blank reference laser beam with a second beam that has been reflected from an object of interest.

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If a beam similar to the original reference beam is shone through a hologram, the result is a three-dimensional image of the object scanned.

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