Synthetic aperture holography: a novel approach to three-dimensional displays

Abstract

We describe an electro-optic apparatus capable of displaying a computer-generated hologram in real time. The computer-generated hologram is calculated by a supercomputer, read from a fast frame buffer, and transmitted to a wide-bandwidth acousto-optic modulator. Coherent light is modulated by the acousto-optic modulator and optically processed to produce a three-dimensional image with horizontal parallax. We evaluate different display geometries and their effect on the optical parameters of the system. We then show how the display resolution can be increased by simultaneously writing three acoustic columns on a single crystal and optically multiplexing the resulting holograms. We finally describe some improvements that follow from the analysis.

<title>Color images with the MIT holographic video display</title>

“…The MIT electronic holography display has demonstrated the possibility of displaying good quality computer generated holographic images of a reasonable size and resolution 1,2,3,4 . Visitors at our laboratory have frequently asked if such a technology could be converted to the display of color images.…”

Holographic 3-D Displays - Electro-holography within the Grasp of Commercialization

“…A well-known example of a horizontal-parallax-only (HPO) hologram is the optically recorded white-light rainbow hologram invented by Benton (Benton, 1969;Benton & H. S. Mingace, 1970). The concept of single parallax holograms was later successfully transferred to computational holography (St-Hilaire et al, 1992). Both benefits and limitations of full and parallax-limited holograms become obvious from Fig.…”

“…Several of them are briefly presented in this chapter as examples. A pioneering holographic display was set up at the MIT Media Lab in S. A. Benton's group and continuously improved (St-Hilaire et al, 1992;Lucente et al, 1993;St-Hilaire et al, 1993). These systems use an acousto-optic modulator (AOM), scanners and an optical imaging system.…”

Progress on characterization and optimization of leaky-mode modulators for holographic video

“…At that time, the spatial light modulators most commonly used for holographic video displays were pixelated modulators 2 and acousto-optic Bragg cells. 3,4 Those using pixelated modulators, such as liquid crystal light valves and MEMs mirrors, had to grapple with problems such as superfluous diffracted orders, conjugate images, and quantization noise 5,6 (see Fig. 1).…”