Real-time embedded hologram calculation for augmented reality glasses

Abstract

Thanks to its ability to provide accurate focus cues, Holography is considered as a promising display technology for augmented reality glasses. However, since it contains a large amount of data, the calculation of a hologram is a time-consuming process which results in prohibiting head-motion-to-photon latency, especially when using embedded calculation hardware. In this paper, we present a real-time hologram calculation method implemented on a NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier embedded platform. Our method is based on two modules: an offline pre-computation module and an on-the-fly hologram synthesis module. In the offline calculation module, the omnidirectional light field scattered by each scene object is individually pre-computed and stored in a Look-Up Table (LUT). Then, in the hologram synthesis module, the light waves corresponding to the viewer's position and orientation are extracted from the LUT in real-time to compute the hologram. Experimental results show that the proposed method is able to compute 2K1K color holograms at more than 50 frames per second, enabling its use in augmented reality applications.