Two chambers. Between them, one plate.
RH-1 is a boundary-control instrument standing on the floor: a quiet anodized column with one luminous glass chamber. Above, the build chamber holds the object. Below, hidden inside the body, a mirrored storage chamber holds the matter it will become. Three identical plate assemblies — top, a double-faced middle, and a storage deck — command both volumes, and every one of them drives both sound and light. Around the chamber, six optically-addressed holographic panels extend that command across the full solid angle.
The closest kin are a watchmaker's bell jar, a telescope pier, and a transporter pad — in that order of restraint.
Three plates, two mirrored chambers.
The field on a closed surface fully determines the field everywhere inside it — so once you command the surface, there is nothing left inside to command. The machine commands two volumes with three identical plate assemblies: the top plate faces down into the build chamber, the storage deck faces up into the storage chamber, and the middle plate is double-faced — two cap stacks back to back, radiating up into the build and down into the stores at once.
The build chamber holds the object.
The only open, visible volume in the machine: Ø444 of low-iron glass between the middle and top plates. The enclosure is two nested glass half-cylinders — the front one rotates 180° on roller tracks to open. No hinges, no swing radius, one motion. Its opening is the entire user ritual: turn the glass, place the cartridge, turn it back, touch begin.
A sensor at the sealed detent gates all drive power: with the glass open, only milliwatt-class listening is electrically possible.
The storage chamber is an instrument, not a bin.
Hidden inside the lower body sits a mirror twin of the build chamber, run by the same physics. It sorts feedstock acoustophoretically — with the same contrast forces the machine uses to sense and to grip — checks incoming material with the identical tomography stack, and stages what the next build will need. Every gram is scanned and sorted before it is ever lifted.
The machine is never idle; it is always either performing or preparing.
Plates focus. Panels address. Glass seals.
The plate pair concentrates the working energy in a column between the faces, the six optically-addressed panels command the steep angles, and the coated glass closes the electromagnetic boundary — a fully commanded surface around the volume, with 165 dB of working field contained to instrument-room silence outside.
Plates focus
Each plate hologram carries a focusing term, so facing plates form a stable open resonator: energy runs plate-to-plate in a confined column, with exponentially small spill at the working bands.
Panels address
Six optically-addressed holographic panels wrap the chamber's rear arc — surfaces whose electromagnetic pattern is written by light and refreshed at terapixel-per-second rates. They transmit and receive across the steep angles beyond the plates' direct aperture, completing full-solid-angle command.
Glass seals
The glass carries a transparent conductive coating — a precision electromagnetic enclosure for the volume-filling bands — and seven slim columns behind it carry dense receive strips, extending the machine's imaging array.
Why the panels are optically addressed.
A conventional phased panel needs a wire and an amplifier per element; an optically-addressed hologram needs only light. A projected pattern writes the panel's electromagnetic state directly onto its surface, so a printed sheet behaves like millions of independently driven elements — the addressing chain is photonic end-to-end. That matters for imaging as much as for drive: in tomography, only frequency and position add genuinely new information, and six commanded surfaces at steep angles complete the tomographic coverage — measurement diversity no processing at the plates alone could reconstruct. It is the next rung on the boundary ladder the architecture climbs by design: from two commanded faces toward all of them.
The lift is a field, not a mechanism.
Feedstock rides a Ø12 bore through the axis of all three plates — the shortest path, and the one that preserves the machine's symmetry. Three winding pairs stacked on one axis give six independent circuits: enough to synthesize a traveling wave that works as a linear-induction elevator for conductive material and as acoustic tube conveying for everything else. No belts, no augers.
The same bore is the machine's optical sightline. The light pulses it launches carry their own dark center — so the beam wraps the transport column without touching it. Light around, matter through.
It runs in ordinary air.No vacuum chamber, no gas plant, no consumables beyond feedstock. The chamber is short and closed, so losses are paid per pass, not per meter — and medium conditioning remains available as a pure performance lever on the roadmap.
The architecture paper states the machine's topology — counts, ratios and ladders rather than millimetres; the RH-1 specification commits the numbers for this instance; the stores paper explains why the pantry needs only four boring staples.