Study on basic problems in real-time 3D holographic display

Abstract

In recent years, real-time three-dimensional (3D) holographic display has attracted more and more attentions. Since a holographic display can entirely reconstruct the wavefront of an actual 3D scene, it can provide all the depth cues for human eye’s observation and perception, and it is believed to be the most promising technology for future 3D display. However, there are several unsolved basic problems for realizing large-size real-time 3D holographic display with a wide field of view. For examples, commercial pixelated spatial light modulators (SLM) always lead to zero-order intensity distortion; 3D holographic display needs a huge number of sampling points for the actual objects or scenes, resulting in enormous computational time; The size and the viewing zone of the reconstructed 3D optical image are limited by the space bandwidth product of the SLM; Noise from the coherent light source as well as from the system severely degrades the quality of the 3D image; and so on. Our work is focused on these basic problems, and some initial results are presented, including a technique derived theoretically and verified experimentally to eliminate the zero-order beam caused by a pixelated phase-only SLM; a method to enlarge the reconstructed 3D image and shorten the reconstruction distance using a concave reflecting mirror; and several algorithms to speed up the calculation of computer generated holograms (CGH) for the display.