Autostereoscopic display using holographic optical elements

Abstract

We have been working on a range of autostereoscopic display technologies based on Holographic Optical Elements (HOEs). We will discuss and demonstrate one such technology which uses a direct view LCD combined with a novel composite HOE. The properties of the HOE allow the independent establishment of viewing zones for arbitrarily chosen sets of the LCD's pixels. The viewing zones can be arbitrarily located and be of arbitrary size. These properties allows the practical realization of a high resolution, full color, real time holographic autostereoscopic display which has full 2D compatibility and allows one or more stereo viewing zones to be moved independently to track one or more mobile viewers. The technique is also free from disturbing artifacts such as flicker, `picket fence' effects, left-right reversal, brightness variations within the viewing zones and overlapping of the left and right channels. The technology shows an economic means of providing a compact, energy efficient, high performance 2D compatible autostereoscopic 3D display.© (1996) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.