Real-time holographic video images with commodity PC hardware

The MIT second-generation holographic video system is a real-time electro-holographic display. The system produces a single-color horizontal parallax only (HPO) holographic image. To reconstruct a three-dimensional image, the display uses a computed fringe pattern with an effective resolution of 256K samples wide by 144 lines high by 8 bits per sample. In this paper we first describe the implementation of a new computational subsystem for the display, replacing custom computing hardware with commodity PC graphics chips, and using OpenGL. We also report the implementation of stereogram computing techniques that employ the PC hardware acceleration to generate and update holographic images at rates of up to two frames per second. These innovations shrink the system’s physical footprint to fit on the table-top and mark the fastest rate at which full computation and update have been achieved on this system to date. Finally we present first results of implementing the Reconfigurable Image Projection (RIP) method of computing high-quality holograms on this new system.