A Holographic and Light-field Processor for Extreme Multi-View Displays

Under this SBIR effort, Holochip will develop its Rainfall Engine holographic processor, an advanced light-field processing unit (LfPU) for real-time synthetic light-field generation and parallel multi-view rendering in AEGIS Display Systems. The Rainfall Engine is capable of creating 3D visuals in real-time for use in plenoptic projectors, holographic and other light-field displays. It is a host application based on the graphics processor unit (GPU) and has significant advantages over conventional serial and cluster rendering approaches, including improvement in the display update rate while providing reduction in render latency, lag, and SWaP-C (size, weight, power and cost). Additionally, the Rainfall Engine will reduce the size, weight, power and cooling of the required computation cluster, as well as the number of computation components and requirements for long-term maintenance and support. Holochip will refine the LfPU architecture and describe the rendering benefits, paradigms and the associated SWaP-C reductions of the Rainfall Engine compared to off-the-shelf computation. Holochip will define the acceptable display list, draw operations, and describe rendering restrictions or limitations. Feasibility will be established by modeling of the 3D real-time visualization refresh rates as compared with current 2D real-time visualization refresh rates.