Hogel-Free Holography

Holography is a promising avenue for high-quality displays without requiring bulky, complex optical systems. While recent work has demonstrated accurate hologram generation of 2D scenes, high-quality holographic projections of 3D scenes has been out of reach until now. Existing multiplane 3D holography approaches fail to model wavefronts in the presence of partial occlusion while holographic stereogram methods have to make a fundamental tradeoff between spatial and angular resolution. In addition, existing 3D holographic display methods rely on heuristic encoding of complex amplitude into phase-only pixels which results in holograms with severe artifacts. Fundamental limitations of the input representation, wavefront modeling, and optimization methods prohibit artifact-free 3D holographic projections in today’s displays. To lift these limitations, we introduce hogel-free holography which optimizes for true 3D holograms, supporting both depth- and view-dependent effects for the first time. Our approach overcomes the fundamental spatio-angular resolution tradeoff typical to stereogram approaches. Moreover, it avoids heuristic encoding schemes to achieve high image fidelity over a 3D volume. We validate that the proposed method achieves 10 dB PSNR improvement on simulated holographic reconstructions. We also validate our approach on an experimental prototype with accurate parallax and depth focus effects.