Synthetic aperture holography: a novel approach to three-dimensional displays

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

We describe an electro-optic apparatus capable of displaying a computer-generated hologram in real time. The computer-generated hologram is calculated by a supercomputer, read from a fast frame buffer, and transmitted to a wide-bandwidth acousto-optic modulator. Coherent light is modulated by the acousto-optic modulator and optically processed to produce a three-dimensional image with horizontal parallax. We evaluate different display geometries and their effect on the optical parameters of the system. We then show how the display resolution can be increased by simultaneously writing three acoustic columns on a single crystal and optically multiplexing the resulting holograms. We finally describe some improvements that follow from the analysis.