This website contains a collection of resources on computational holography for computer graphics. I've been interested in holography for a long time, but didn't start seriously working on it until the fall of 2014. I started working on head-mounted displays in 1989 and built my first CAVE in 1998. Both of these technologies are a step above a flat screen, but there were two things about them that bothered me. First, I had to wear something in order to see 3D. In the case of an HMD this completely blocked by view of the real world. Try to drink coffee while wearing an HMD. Second, both HMDs and CAVEs present conflicting 3D cues. In particular, the viewer is focusing on a screen that is a fixed distance from the eyes, but the objects being displayed are at different distances. Thus, the convergence and focus cues are conflicting with the other 3D cues resulting in fatigue and other visual problems. I really wanted something better. I want a display I can walk right up to and use and have all the correct 3D cues.
Holography is the only known display technique that reproduces all of the 3D cues. Unfortunately, holography has largely been ignored by the computer graphics community due its computational requirements. With modern multicore processors the computational barrier is starting to disappear making this a feasible display technology for computer graphics. When I started seriously looking at holography several years ago I found there was no easy entry point for computer graphics researchers. There is an extensive literature on holography in optics and physics, but this literature is hard to follow without the appropriate background. In addition inexpensive holographics displays that could be used as a starting point for research in this area. This website provides aims to fill this gap by providing some of the background for getting started in computational holography. It also contains instructions for building a relatively inexpensive holographic display and software that can be used to drive it.
This website is divided into the following sections: