Practical holography at SPIE Photonics West

I'm in San Francisco this week for SPIE Photonics West, "the world's leading photonics, laser, and biomedical optics event," according to the conference slogan. The conference is huge. In fact, it consists of five separate but contemporaneous conferences: BiOS (1771 research papers), LASE (662), MOEMS-MEMS (202), OPTO (1320), and Green Photonics (270).