Holographic and Light-Field Imaging as Future 3-D Displays

Light-field imaging and holographic imaging are currently the two mostly investigated 3-D imaging technologies because of their potentials to create the viewing environment conforming to a natural viewing condition. The basic optical geometries for image display in these imaging are not different from that of integral photography. The images in the two type of imaging are a set of different view images. These images are arranged as a 2-D point image array, and each point image is expanded with a certain angle to form a viewing zone. The differences between the two types of imaging are the number of point images in the array and the physical entities forming the images. Holographic imaging has many more point images than light-field imaging, and each image in the array consists of coherent right rays from different positions of an object. In light-field imaging, an array of pixels represents a direction view of the object. Despite these differences, they share the same goal of providing a continuous parallax to viewers and require display panels of almost the same characteristics. It is expected that in the future these two imaging techniques will be integrated into the same flat panel along with the plane image.