By Roland Piquepaille
Researchers from Seoul National University have developed a full-color autostereoscopic three-dimensional display, which can be viewed without glasses, according to this short article from Technology Research News. They used a set of six holograms to generate 3D images and video. The system, which is 60 centimeters long, generates slightly different images for the left and right eyes to produce a three-dimensional effect. Such a system could come to market within five years to be used for video broadcasting or in medical and military applications. Read more...The autostereoscopic system consists of red, green, and blue laser diodes, a liquid-crystal spatial light modulator and a projection lens, and is 60 centimeters long. It generates slightly different images for the left and right eyes to produce the effect of natural three-dimensional vision.
Rather than three-dimensional holograms, which are difficult to calculate, the system produces two-dimensional red, green and blue holograms for each eye. These holograms are reproduced by shining a laser through a liquid-crystal display that shows the holograms' light and dark patterns.
The researchers' system shines red, green and blue lasers through a single liquid crystal light modulator, which switches rapidly among the six hologram patterns. The three color holograms for each eye overlap to produce a full-color image. The output is focused through a lens to direct the two images to the left and right eyes.
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Here is a schematic diagram of their proposed full-color autostereoscopic 3D display system (Credit: Seoul National University). |
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And here is the optical setup, which uses a Fourier optic system, three laser diode sources, and a projection lens module (Credit: Seoul National University). |
[Note: In the above diagram, CDC stands for "color-dispersion-compensated" and SPH for "synthetic phase hologram."]
What will be this relatively cheap system will be used for?
The three-dimensional displays could eventually be used to display any type of dynamic data for use in entertainment, art, medicine, and military applications.
[And with] a parallel processing computer system and a specialized chip, the method could be used for real-time three-dimensional broadcasting, according to the researchers.
The research work has been published by Optics Express under the long title "Full-color autostereoscopic 3D display system using color-dispersion-compensated synthetic phase holograms."
Here are two links to the abstract and to the full paper (PDF format, 8 pages, 886 KB). The above diagrams were extracted from this paper.
Sources: Technology Research News, November 18, 2004; Optics Express, Vol. 12, No. 21, Pages 5229-5236, October 18, 2004
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