Incremental update of computer-generated holograms

Wendy Plesniak MIT Media Laboratory Spatial Imaging Group Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139 Abstract. We describe the incremental computing method for making localized changes to a computer-generated hologram to rapidly modify the 3-D image it reconstructs. The method populates a scene with holographic primitives, tracks scene-based changes, and updates the diffractive contributions of only affected primitives. Changes are rapidly incorporated into the hologram via simple arithmetic operations, and only affected regions of the hologram are updated at each simulation time step. The method can accommodate different holographic primitive representations, is designed to be suitable for hardware assistance, and is also compatible with computer-graphics-style techniques for smooth shading, texture mapping, and reflections. © 2003 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers. [DOI: 10.1117/1.1572501]