A Scalable Volumetric Three Dimensional Display Concept

The world around us is three dimensional (3D), yet most existing cameras and display systems handle only two dimensional (2D) flat images that lack the depth information. This fundamental restriction greatly limits the capability of human being in perceiving and understanding the complexity of real world objects.One common problem shared by past development efforts of a number of 3D volumetric display mechanisms is that although the concepts can be demonstrated using the proof-of-concept prototypes, it is very difficult to scale-up to actually produce a full color, full resolution and full size 3D volumetric display systems, due to many inherent limitations of these concepts.We believe that it is extremely important to develop a 3D volumetric display concept that is inherently Scalable. Large size, full color, and full resolution 3D display system can be built using mechanisms that do not have serious problems in scale-up production. The primary objective of the Phase I SBIR program proposed herein is to investigate a novel concept of generating high resolution, full color and large size true 3D volumetric images and producing scalable 3D display systems. Besides the ability to produce high resolution full color true 3D volumetric 3D images without need of viewing glasses, additional advantages of the proposed 3D display method are large angle of view, simultaneous multiple user views, large viewing volumes, flexibility in voxel size and shape, high voxel bandwidth and inherent parallel scanning architecture.In this Phase I SBIR effort, we will investigate the feasibility of the proposed 3D display concept. Both the theoretical aspects and implementation details will be studied. We will build a prototype system and perform various experiment to validate the feasiblity of operation and ability of scale-up for the 3D display system. Our ultimate goal of this SBIR program is to develop the technology of building scalable 3D volumetric display and develop commercially viable 3D display products wilh full size, full resolution and full color for many practical applications.