ID: 2017-029 Room-sized scanned-aperture holographic video display with low complexity
Principal Investigator: Daniel Smalley
This is the first feasible approach, an efficient and low cost approach, to room sized holography. It uses circular symmetry to eliminate the angle limitations of an optical axis in a scanned aperture holography system.
A scanned aperture holographic video display consists of a telescope made of two lenses and a scanner at the fourier plane where the focal length of those two lenses meet. Typically such systems are limited in angle by the optical axis of the lenses making the telescope. In this invention the final lens is a circular lens and has no axis but instead is circularly symmetric. Also the scanner, which is usually a small polygon that the user looks at from the outside will instead be a large polygon that the user looks at from the inside as it spins. In one instantiation the user sits in a swiveling chair. Underneath, there is a spatial light modulator (an array of leaky mode modulator channels, paired, for large angular sweep and possibly combined with other arrays for full color, perhaps with a color combiner cube). The SLM modulates some number of lines of the final display output these pass through the first lens of the telescope and perhaps some other optics, such as a polarizer to filter noise or a bravais system to make the source appear further away and increase the magnification factor of the telescope. Then the light travels to half the radius of the circle which is the fourier plane for the large circular output reflector lens. Here is found a moving mirror structure, a large array of moving mirrors. These mirrors scan the output of the modulator. They may be actively aimed and tilted by, for example, solinoids on their mount and may have lasers and detectors to keep them precisely aligned as they spin. This scanning mirror derotates the leaky mode devices and also directs the light to the large circular output reflector which forms the second lens of the telescope and redirects the light to the user.
About the Market:
This technology will be used to make near-eye holographic displays and flat screen holographic displays. The holographic displays global market is expected to reach over $3.5 billion in annual sales by 2020, and $1.82 bllion by 2021 in Americas (driven mainly by growth of commercial and medical industry).
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