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The Light Stuff
A pioneer in the commercialization of holograms, Peter Scheir's New Haven company, AD 2000, enters a new dimension
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Business New Haven
6/11/2003
By: Richard Rangoon
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Peter Scheir's company, AD 2000, produces holograms, many like the shiny, silver images on most credit cards. The difference is that Scheir's New Haven-based business creates affordable stock holograms. At the same time, major corporations hire Scheir to create custom holograms for promotion, security, brand recognition and authenticity.
Scheir's studios might best be described as somewhere between an avant-garde art show and an extensive butterfly collection. His cabinets are filled with hundreds of plates containing 3-D images on a two-dimensional plane.
He opens a drawer and takes out a hologram featuring a 3-D profile of a human head - brain and all. The cross-section was custom-made for use in a medical encyclopedia, but has since been incorporated into his trademarked HoloBank, a collection of stock images.
"Many of the customizable stock images in HoloBank were originally used for other purposes," Scheir explains.
On a less macabre note is a portrait of Shakespeare, a pink rose, an aircraft ascending into the clouds, and a man teeing off at a golf course.
Although he's created special hologram displays at Disney World in Florida, Grumman's Chinese Theater in California, and Caesar's Palace in Nevada, the HoloBank is Scheir's special niche.
"I realized early on that there was an untapped market for customized holograms, where customers had short delivery times or smaller budgets that could not be served through custom holography. I developed HoloBank to meet those needs," Scheir says.
Clients can choose from among hundreds of Scheir's stock designs. Total costs from setup to production start at $180, including custom imprinting, he says. Thousands of businesses have benefited from his ability to produce small runs of as few as 500 copies. In some cases he can have the holograms ready the day he receives the order, Scheir adds.
AD 2000 has been more than 20 years in the making. While visiting a show, the then 22-year-old high-school graduate saw a hologram for the first time and was infatuated.
"I was a jeweler in Seattle at that time and found a fantastic lab in Vancouver, and I began by making jewelry out of their holograms. I figured everyone would want one and I could sell them for a year or so and retire," Scheir recalls with a smile.
He didn't know how holograms were made and wasn't sure if a market existed for them, but he was optimistic that demand would increase rapidly as the holograms caught on. So in 1983 he launched "Another Dimension Inc.," a wholesale company providing holograms to gift and museum shops.
By the late 1980s, the company was grossing about $350,000 annually, enabling him to pay off the debt he owed and to sell the company in 1991 to one of his former customers, a titanium jewelry manufacturer in Florida.
However, without his parents' backing - emotional and otherwise - Scheir's infatuation with holograms probably would have remained a hobby. His parents had lent him $40,000 from an equity loan on their house to help finance Another Dimension, and one or both of them have worked at AD 2000 for the past 12 years. The company currently employs six people.
"We have been able to make use of a small team of good people, while effectively utilizing sub-contractor and job shops to keep our overhead low," Scheir explains.
As with many start-ups, the first few years are the most difficult, and AD 2000 operated in the red from 1987 until 1993. But in 1996, AD 2000 turned a profit and has since stayed in the black.
Scheir says he is confident his business will grow as people become more aware of holograms as a business tool. "Less than 1 percent of businesses worldwide have taken advantage of the powerful impact of holograms," he says.
Last month Scheir signed a marketing agreement with Hatco - manufacturer of Stetson hats - and is currently working on holograms for the U.S. Army and Siemens, a manufacturer of medical equipment. AD 2000 also recently fulfilled a contract for Zippo lighters.
Clients who use AD 2000's hologram for promotion include Luxor Casino in Nevada, with its pharaoh hologram, and American Express, with its hologram of Earth.
AD 2000's distinctive holograms provide security on items such as wristbands or badge holders, and DVD manufacturers use the company's holograms to deter theft and verify authenticity. The company's holograms also verify the authenticity of items ranging from footballs to diamonds.
"We have clients from more than 20 countries purchasing authenticating holograms," Scheir explains. "Security holograms are on many U.S. drivers licenses and passports, as well as visas, stamps, and the currency of many countries."
Other holograms are used primarily for design - for instance, the company Burton uses AD 2000 holograms on its most popular snowboards.
So you know what a hologram looks like, and what it is used for, but what is it and how do you make one? Scheir is hesitant to answer that question - for one thing, the concept is so alien to most people that any explanation is usually confusing.
The only way really to understand a hologram is to make one.
Scheir explains that "Every point of an object is represented on every part of a hologram." The making of a hologram involves lasers (single-frequency light) and light-processing devices, also known as optics.
After beginning to draw a diagram of multiple lenses and laser paths, Scheir stops and says that the most useful explanation for many people is that holograms are "lasers and magic." He has found that most people don't want to spend the time to understand the technology behind the Nobel Prize-winning process. For many, the Greek translation of the word - "whole image" - says it all.
Scheir's drive to understand holograms was driven by his desire to reproduce and create anew what he saw. The odds seemed against him: At the time, literature about holograms was scarce, he didn't have a college education, and he had little scientific training.
However, he read what he could find, went to symposiums to speak with physicists, and sought out artists who could shed light on the creation of three-dimensional objects. "Who could have known," he says, "that I would become one of the world's foremost experts in the field of holographic applications?"
Who, indeed?
Today, Scheir is splitting his attentions and his time between his work and his upcoming marriage to a woman from Romania.
At the time of their first meeting, Scheir was using an Internet messaging program that randomly connects people from all over the world to chat online. However, sometimes the program randomly connects to a person in another country, he says.
During one of these online forays, Scheir was connected to a woman in Romania named Iuliana, and he calls the rest of the story even more magical than holography itself.
Although AD 2000 is doing well, he says, many of Scheir's clients are cutting their budgets, and he is working more hours to compensate for the stagnant business climate. However, the overall demand for holograms is increasing as businesses become more aware of their commercial applications.
"Holography has finally come of age," Scheir says. "With the solid base we've built, we are prepared for a multitude of different businesses finding their way to our modest facility here in New Haven."
As long as he remains the creative capitalist he is, he doesn't foresee anything but blue sky and sparkling holograms ahead.
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