Holographic video display based on guided-wave acousto-optic devices

We introduce a new holo-video display architecture (“Mark III”) developed at the MIT Media Laboratory. The goal of the Mark III project is to reduce the cost and size of a holo-video display, making it into an inexpensive peripheral to a standard desktop PC or game machine which can be driven by standard graphics chips. Our new system is based on lithium niobate guided-wave acousto-optic devices, which give twenty or more times the bandwidth of the tellurium dioxide bulk-wave acousto-optic modulators of our previous displays. The novel display architecture is particularly designed to eliminate the high-speed horizontal scanning mechanism that has traditionally limited the scalability of Scophony-style video displays. We describe the system architecture and the guided-wave device, explain how it is driven by a graphics chip, and present some early results.