A Scalable Hardware and Software System for the Holographic Display of Interactive Graphics Applications

We present a scalable holographic system design targeting multi-user interactive computer graphics applications. The display uses a specially arranged array of micro-displays and a holographic screen. Each point of the holo- graphic screen emits light beams of different color and intensity to the various directions, in a controlled manner. The light beams are generated through a light modulation system arranged in a specic geometry and the holo- graphic screen makes the necessary optical transformation to compose these beams into a perfectly continuous 3D view. With proper software control, the light beams leaving the various pixels can be made to propagate in multiple directions, as if they were emitted from physical objects at xed spatial locations. The display is driven by DVI streams generated by multiple consumer level graphics boards and decoded in real-time by image pro- cessing units that feed the optical modules at high refresh rates. An OpenGL compliant library running on a client PC redenes the OpenGL behavior to multicast graphics commands to server PCs, where they are re-interpreted for implementing holographic rendering. The feasibility of the approach has been successfully evaluated with a working hardware and software 7.4M pixel prototype driven at 10-15Hz by three DVI streams.