Holobricks: Modular Coarse Integral Holographic Displays

Abstract

Here, we propose and demonstrate a modular holographic display system that allows seamless spatial tiling of multiple coarse integral holographic (CIH) displays called “holobricks”. A holobrick is a self-contained CIH module enclosing a spatial light modulator (SLM), a scanner, and periscopic coarse integral optics. Modular CIH uses a coarse pitch and small area but high-bandwidth SLM in conjunction with periscopic coarse integral optics to form the angularly tiled 3D holograms with large viewing areas and fields of view. The creation of periscopic coarse integral optics prevents the optical system from being larger than the holographic image and allows the holographic fringe pattern to fill the entire face of the holobrick. Thus, multiple holobricks can be seamlessly abutted to form a scalable spatially tiled holographic image display capable of both wide field-of-view angle and arbitrary large-size area. We demonstrate an initial prototype that seamlessly tiles two holobricks each with 1024×768 pixels, 40° FOV, full color, 24 fps, displaying 2D, 3D holographic stereograms, and full parallax 3D CGI Fresnel holograms.