A low cost holographic display

Holography can be viewed as the ultimate display technology since it correctly duplicates all the cues used by our visual system. In the graphics community this technology has largely been ignored in the past due to its computational cost, but this is changing as more powerful parallel processors are becoming available. One of the main challenges in this area is the lack of a commercially available display device at a reasonable cost that can be used for testing and evaluating algorithms. This paper describes a low cost holographic display device that can easily be constructed from standard parts as a solution to this problem. This paper discusses the design considerations for such a device, its construction and an overview of how holograms can be computed for it. It is our hope that this device will stimulate further research on holography within the computer graphics community.