Tunable liquid crystal grating based holographic 3D display system with wide viewing angle and large size

As one of the most ideal display approaches, holographic 3-dimensional (3D) display has always been a research hotspot since the holographic images reproduced in such system are very similar to what humans see the actual environment. However, current holographic 3D displays suffer from critical bottlenecks of narrow viewing angle and small size. Here, we propose a tunable liquid crystal grating-based holographic 3D display system with wide viewing angle and large size. Our tunable liquid crystal grating, providing an adjustable period and the secondary diffraction of the reconstructed image, enables to simultaneously implement two different hologram generation methods in achieving wide viewing angle and enlarged size, respectively. By using the secondary diffraction mechanism of the tunable liquid crystal grating, the proposed system breaks through the limitations of narrow viewing angle and small size of holographic 3D display. The proposed system shows a viewing angle of 57.4°, which is nearly 7 times of the conventional case with a single spatial light modulator, and the size of the reconstructed image is enlarged by about 4.2. The proposed system will have wide applications in medical diagnosis, advertising, education and entertainment and other fields.