Pixelated Blazed Gratings for High Brightness Multiview Holographic 3D Display

Multiview 3D display can reveal wondrous information of a 3D image without any visual aids. Therefore, it has great potential in many applications, such as education, game, training, and design. Among all the multiview 3D display techniques, the one that is based on diffractive optics and metasurface can present 3D images with ultrawide field of view and low crosstalk. However, the brightness of diffractive multiview 3D display is limited by the diffraction efficiency. Moreover, the low fabrication efficiency and high cost limit the commercial development of 3D display based on metasurface. Here we propose a multiview 3D display based on multi-level pixelated blazed gratings. The period and orientation of each blazed grating in the view modulator is different to form a converged light field. A 4-view prototype was assembled by integrating the view modulator with a shadow mask for the modulation of light intensity. A 3D thoracic cage model was virtually projected within the viewing angle with minimum crosstalk. The light efficiency of the prototype is significantly improved to 60% for 4-level blazed gratings.