How to build a holographic television system

Abstract

The ultimate three-dimensional television viewing experience will be autostereoscopic (requiring no glasses), provide smooth parallax rather than just two views, and support other real-world perceptual cues to depth such as visual accommodation (focusing). Holography meets these requirements, but it is often felt that the scene-acquisition, bandwidth, and display pixel count requirements for holographic television will prove insurmountable. We describe the characteristics of a “true” holographic television display, review the input, transmission, and output needs, and describe our experiments in creating an end-to-end holographic television system with costs in only the hundreds of dollars, based upon a combination of various current consumer-electronics technologies and a novel light-modulator chip.