Updateable Holographic Reticle for Situational Awareness and Targeting

Distant and high-velocity targets require a visual system that can assist the end-user in identifying threats and making fast decisions. Such systems may include reticles for tracking and aiming, and next generation reticles should have the ability to change form or shape to provide situational awareness to operators. Holographic reticles are better suited for this task than the typically-used technology (LED, LCD, OLED) because visual cues can be accurately recreated to reduce effects like parallax. Reticles created by holograms are autostereoscopic and require no accessory optics or aids to view. Furthermore, a holographic reticle system can be made more compact, because the demands on the collimation and projection optics are reduced. In the proposed optical configuration, the reference beam will be modulated instead of calculating hologram fringes for image reconstruction, which greatly reduces complexity of the system and computation time for the reticle frame rate. In this Phase I, the objective is to determine the feasibility of an updateable holographic reticle that can be compact and made with COTS components.