Interactive three-dimensional holographic displays: seeing the future in depth

ABSTRACT

Computer graphics is confined chiefly to flat images. Images may look three-dimensional (3D), and sometimes create the illusion of 3D when displayed, for example, on a stereoscopic display [16, 13, 12]. Nevertheless, when viewing an image on most display systems, the human visual system (HVS) sees a flat plane of pixels. Volumetric displays can create a 3D computer graphics image, but fail to provide many visual depth cues (e.g. shading texture gradients) and cannot provide the powerful depth cue of overlap (occlusion). Discrete parallax displays (such as lenticular displays) promise to create 3D images with all of the depth cues, but are limited by achievable resolution. Only a real-time electronic holographic ("holovideo") display [11, 6, 8, 7, 9, 21, 22, 20, 2] can create a truly 3D computer graphics image with all of the depth cues (motion parallax, ocular accommodation, occlusion, etc.) and resolution sufficient to provide extreme realism [13]. Holovideo displays promise to enhance numerous applications in the creation and manipulation of information, including telepresence, education, medical imaging, interactive design and scientific visualization.The technology of electronic interactive three-dimensional holographic displays is in its first decade. Though fancied in popular science fiction, only recently have researchers created the first real holovideo systems by confronting the two basic requirements of electronic holography: computational speed and high-bandwidth modulation of visible light. This article describes the approaches used to address these problems, as well as emerging technologies and techniques that provide firm footing for the development of practical holovideo.

REFERENCES

• 1: 1. Florence J. M. and R. O. Gale."Coherent optical correlator using a deformable mirror device spatial light modulator in the Fourier plane" Applied Optics, vol. 27, #11, pp. 2091-2093, June, 1988.
• 2: 2. Fukaya, Naoki, Keiichi Maeno, Koki Sato and Toshio Honda. Improved electroholographic display using liquid crystal devices to shorten the viewing distance with both eye observation" Optical Engineering, vol. 35, #6, pp. 1545-1549, June, 1996.
• 3: 3. Fukushima, S., T. Kurokawa and M. Ohno. "Real-time hologram construction and reconstruction using a high-resolution spatial light modulator" Appl. Phys. Lett., vol. 58 #8, pp. 787-789, Aug., 1991.
• 4: 4. Hariharan, P. Optical Holography: principles, techniques, and applications. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
• 5: 5. Hashimoto N. and S. Morokawa. "Real-time electroholographic system using liquid crystal television spatial light modulators" J. of Electronic Imaging, vol. 2(2), pp. 93-99, 1993.
• 6: M. Lucente, Computational holographic bandwidth compression, IBM Systems Journal, v.35 n.3-4, p.349-365, 1996
• 7: Mark Lucente , Frederic R. Morgenthaler, Diffraction-specific fringe computation for electro-holography, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1994
• 8: 8. Lucente, Mark. "Holographic bandwidth compression using spatial subsampling," Optical Engineering, vol. 35, #6, pp. 1529- 1537, June, 1996.
• 9: 9. Lucente, Mark. "Interactive computation of holograms using a look-up table" Journal of Electronic Imaging, vol. 2, #1, pp. 28-34, Jan., 1993.
• 10: 10. Lucente, Mark. Unpublished work by the author.
• 11: Mark Lucente , Tinsley A. Galyean, Rendering interactive holographic images, Proceedings of the 22nd annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.387-394, September 1995 [doi>10.1145/218380.218490]
• 12: David F. McAllister, Stereo computer graphics: and other true 3D technologies, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1993
• 13: Michael McKenna , David Zeltzer, Three dimensional visual display systems for virtual environments, Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, v.1 n.4, p.421-458, Fall 1992
• 14: 14. Mok, F., J. Diep, H.-K. Liu and D. Psaltis. "Real-time computer-generared hologram by means of liquid-crystal television spatial light modulator" Opt. Lett. vol. 11 #11, pp. 748- 750, Nov., 1986.
• 15: 15. Nordin, Gregory P., Jeffrey H. Kulick, Robert G. Lindquist, Michael W. Jones, P. Nasiatka and Stephen T. Kowel. "Liquid crystal-on-silicon implementation of the partial pixel three-dimensional display architecture," Applied Optics, vol. 34. #19, pp. 3756-3763, July, 1995.
• 16: 16. Okoshi, Takanori. Three-Dimensional Imaging Techniques. New York:Academic Press, 1976.
• 17: 17. Onural, Levent, G. Bozdagi and Abdullah Atalar. "New high resolution display device for holographic three dimensional video: principles and simulations," Optical Engineering, vol. 33, #3, pp. 835-844, March, 1994.
• 18: 18. Pappu, Ravikanth. "Nonuniformly sampled computer-generated holograms," Optical Engineering, vol. 35, #6, pp. 1538-1544, June, 1996.
• 19: 19. Psaltis, Dimitri, E. G. Paek and S. S. Venkatesh. "Optical image correlation with a binary spatial light modulator" Optical Engineering, vol. 23, #6, pp. 698-704, 1984.
• 20: 20. St. Hilaire, Pierre. "Scalable optical architecture for electronic holography," Optical Engineering, vol. 34 #10, pp. 2900-2911, Oct. 1995.
• 21: 21. St. Hilaire, Pierre, Stephen A. Benton and Mark Lucente. "Synthetic aperture holography: a novel approach to three dimensional displays," Journal of the Optical Society of America A, vol. 9, #11, pp. 1969-1977, Nov. 1992.
• 22: 22. St. Hilaire, Pierre, S.A. Benton, M. Lucente and P. M. Hubel. "Color images with the MIT holographic video display," In SPIE Proceedings #1667 Practical Holography VI, (SPIE, Bellingham, WA), pp. 73-84, 1992.
• 23: 23. Watlington, John A, Mark Lucente, Carlton. J. Sparrell, V. M. Bove, Jr. and I. Tamitani. "A hardware architecture for rapid generation of electro-holographic fringe patterns," Practical Holography IX, Proceedings of the SPIE (Bellingham, WA) volume 2406, paper 2406-23, pages 172-183, 1995.
• 24: 24. Yoshikawa, Hiroshi and Hirokazu Kameyama. "Integral holography," In SPIE Prec. #2406 Practical Holography IX (SPIE, Bellingham, WA), S.A. Benton, editor, pp. 226-234, 1995.
• 25: 25. Yoshikawa, Hiroshi and Junji Tamai. "Holographic image compression by motion picture coding, in SPIE Proc. #2652 Practical Holography X (SPIE, Bellingham, WA), S.A. Benton, editor, pp. 2-9, 1996.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.3 COMPUTER GRAPHICS
      I.3.6 Methodology and Techniques
          Subjects: Interaction techniques

Additional Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.3 COMPUTER GRAPHICS

General Terms:
Design, Human Factors, Performance, Theory