Hardware-based rendering of full-parallax synthetic holograms

We present a method for efficiently calculating the interference of complex-valued two-dimensional wave patterns that is useful during the generation of synthetic holograms. These patterns are represented as a special kind of images (textures), and the interference is calculated in a computer graphics rendering process. This enables us to leverage hardware support for holographic imaging that is implemented in many state-of-the-art computer workstations. Using this approach, we gain a speedup of a factor of 60-90 compared with conventional calculation methods for interfering wave patterns. Our method is evaluated numerically, examples are shown, and the program code is outlined.