Every holographic video display is built on a spatial light modulator, which directs light by diffraction to form points in three-dimensional space. The modulators currently used for holographic video displays are challenging to use for several reasons: they have relatively low bandwidth, high cost, low diffraction angle, poor scalability, and the presence of quantization noise, unwanted diffractive orders and zero-order light. Here we present modulators for holographic video displays based on anisotropic leaky-mode couplers, which have the potential to address all of these challenges. These modulators can be fabricated simply, monolithically and at low cost. Additionally, these modulators are capable of new functionalities, such as wavelength division multiplexing for colour display. We demonstrate three enabling properties of particular interest-polarization rotation, enlarged angular diffraction, and frequency domain colour filtering-and suggest that this technology can be used as a platform for low-cost, high-performance holographic video displays.

A colour holographic display is considered the ultimate apparatus to provide the most natural 3D viewing experience. It encodes a 3D scene as holographic patterns that then are used to reproduce the optical wavefront. The main challenge at present is for the existing technologies to cope with the full information bandwidth required for the computation and display of holographic video. We have developed a dynamic coarse integral holography approach using opto-mechanical scanning, coarse integral optics and a low space-bandwidth-product high-bandwidth spatial light modulator to display dynamic holograms with a large space-bandwidth-product at video rates, combined with an efficient rendering algorithm to reduce the information content. This makes it possible to realise a full-parallax, colour holographic video display with a bandwidth of 10 billion pixels per second, and an adequate image size and viewing angle, as well as all relevant 3D cues. Our approach is scalable and the prototype can achieve even better performance with continuing advances in hardware components.