Trying to stay sane despite rapid advances in scientific understanding and technology!

Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Holographic video could enable 2D displays with higher resolution and less power consumption



Media Labis building a prototype color holographic-video display whose resolution is roughly that of a standard-definition TV and which can update video images 30 times a second, fast enough to produce the illusion of motion. The heart of the display is an optical chip, resembling a microscope slide, that Smalley built, using only MIT facilities, for about $10.

"Until now, if you wanted to make a light modulator for a video projector, or an LCD panel for a TV, or something like that, you had to deal with the red light, the green light and the blue light separately," he says. "If you look closely at an LCD panel, each pixel actually has three little color filters in it. There's a red subpixel, a green subpixel and a blue subpixel."
"First of all," he continues, "that's inefficient, because the filters, even if they were perfect, would throw away two-thirds of the light. But second, it reduces either the resolution or the speed at which the modulator can operate."
According to Smalley, on the other hand, "What's most exciting about [the new chip] is that it's a waveguide-based platform, which is a major departure from every other type of spatial light modulator used for holographic video right now."

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