Projects in Vr Reconstructing Holograms with Digital Light Augmenting Holograms

12 September/October 2006 Published by the IEEE Computer Society 0272-1716/06/$20.00 © 2006 IEEE Among all the imaging techniques invented throughout the past several decades, computer graphics represent one of today’s most successful methods. Many areas in science, entertainment, education, and engineering would be unimaginable without the aid of 2D or 3D computer graphics. Interactivity provides an important reason for this success story, a property that competing technologies—such as holography— still cannot provide efficiently. In parallel to the development of computer graphics, and despite their noninteractivity, advances in optical and digital holography have made possible the creation of new fields including interferometry, copy protection, data storage, holographic optical elements, and display holograms. Display holography in particular has conquered several application domains. Museum exhibits often use optical holograms because they can present 3D objects with almost no loss in visual quality. In contrast to most stereoscopic or autostereoscopic graphics displays, holographic images can provide all depth cues. Today, computer graphics and raster displays offer megapixel resolution and interactive rendering of megabytes of data. Optical holograms, however, provide a terapixel resolution and can present information content in the range of terabytes in real time. Both dimensions will be out of reach for computer graphics and conventional displays for the next several years. Researchers in several domains are using holography and computer graphics as tools to solve individual research, engineering, and presentation problems. Up until now, however, these tools have been applied separately. The goal of the HoloGraphics project at BauhausUniversity Weimar was to investigate possibilities of combining the advantages of conventional holograms— such as high visual quality and realism, support for all depth queues and for multiple observers at no computational cost, and space efficiency—with the advantages of today’s computer graphics capabilities—such as interactivity, real-time rendering, simulation and animation, and stereoscopic and autostereoscopic presentation. This article presents some of our project’s findings.