Large Étendue 3D Holographic Display with Content-adpative Dynamic Fourier Modulation

Abstract

Emerging holographic display technology offers unique capabilities for next-generation virtual reality systems. Current holographic near-eye displays, however, only support a small étendue, which results in a direct tradeoff between achievable field of view and eyebox size. Étendue expansion has recently been explored, but existing approaches are either fundamentally limited in the image quality that can be achieved or they require extremely high-speed spatial light modulators.

We describe a new étendue expansion approach that combines multiple coherent sources with content-adaptive amplitude modulation of the hologram spectrum in the Fourier plane. To generate time-multiplexed phase and amplitude patterns for our spatial light modulators, we devise a pupil-aware gradient-descent-based computer-generated holography algorithm that is supervised by a large-baseline target light field. Compared with relevant baseline approaches, our method demonstrates significant improvements in image quality and étendue in simulation and with an experimental holographic display prototype.