Full-circle viewing: 360-degree electronic holographic display 2016
Full-circle viewing: 360-degree electronic holographic display 2016
Princess Leia, your Star Wars hologram moment may be redeemed.
In the original 'Star Wars' movie, the inviting but grainy special effects hologram might soon be a true full-color, full-size holographic image, due to advances by a South Korean research team refining 3-D holographic displays.
The team described a novel tabletop display system that allows multiple viewers to simultaneously view a hologram showing a full 3-D image as they walk around the tabletop, giving complete 360-degree access. The paper was published this week in the journal Optics Express, from The Optical Society (OSA).
To be commercially feasible in a range of applications -- from medicine to gaming to media -- the hologram challenge is daunting. It involves scaling an electronic device to a size small enough to fit on a table top, while making it robust enough to render immense amounts of data needed to create a full-surround 3-D viewing experience from every angle -- without the need for special glasses or other viewing aids.
"In the past, researchers interested in holographic display systems proposed or focused on methods for overcoming limitations in the combined spatial resolution and speed of commercially available, spatial light modulators. Representative techniques included space-division multiplexing (SDM), time-division multiplexing (TDM) and combination of those two techniques," explained Yongjun Lim, of the 5G Giga Communication Research Laboratory, Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, South Korea. Lim and his team took a different approach. They devised and added a novel viewing window design.
