Since its discovery almost 70 years ago, the hologram has been considered to reproduce the most realistic three dimensional images without visual side effects. Holographic video has been extensively researched for commercialization, since Benton et al. at MIT Media Lab developed the first holographic video systems in 1990. However, commercially available holographic video displays have not been introduced yet for several reasons: narrow viewing angle, bulky optics and heavy computing power. Here we present an interactive slim-panel holographic video display using a steering-backlight unit and a holographic video processor to solve the above issues. The steering-backlight unit enables to expand the viewing angle by 30 times and its diffractive waveguide architecture makes a slim display form-factor. The holographic video processor computes high quality holograms in real-time on a single-chip. We suggest that the slim-panel holographic display can provide realistic three-dimensional video in office and household environments.

We propose an optical system for synthesizing double-phase complex computer-generated holograms using a phase-only spatial light modulator and a phase grating filter. Two separated areas of the phase-only spatial light modulator are optically superposed by 4-f configuration with an optimally designed grating filter to synthesize arbitrary complex optical field distributions. The tolerances related to misalignment factors are analyzed, and the optimal synthesis method of double-phase computer-generated holograms is described.

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A slim beam deflector that satisfies both a large steering angle and a large area can be very useful in various applications. However, a smaller electrode pitch for a large steering angle and enlargement of its area are trade-off relations due to the limited number of control channels in an electrically tunable beam deflector system. For a large steering angle in the active area where actual diffraction occurs, an indium tin oxide electrode of 2 µm pitch was implemented through a stepper lithography. The via-hole process was developed to expand the reduced active area due to the small electrode pitch. We developed a beam deflector with 7200 controllable channels in an active area of 14.4 m m × 14.4 m m . The maximum steering angle is 7.643° at a wavelength of 532 nm.

Three-dimensional holographic system using active shutters for head mounted display application is proposed. Conventional three-dimensional head mounted display suffers from eye-fatigue since it only provides binocular disparity, not monocular depth cues like accommodation. The proposed method presents two holograms of a 3D scene to corresponding eyes using active shutters. Since a holography delivered to each eye has full three-dimensional information, not only the binocular depth cues but also monocular depth cues are presented, eliminating eye-fatigue. The application to the head mounted display also greatly relaxes the viewing angle requirement that is one of the main issues of the conventional holographic displays. In presentation, the proposed optical system will be explained in detail with experimental results.