Sparse holographic imaging for an integrated augmented reality near-eye display.

Diffraction is the main physical effect involved in the imaging process of holographic displays. In the application of near-eye displays, it generates physical limits that constrain the field of view of the devices. In this contribution, we evaluate experimentally an alternative approach for a holographic display based mainly on refraction. This unconventional imaging process, based on sparse aperture imaging, could lead to integrated near-eye displays through retinal projection, with a larger field of view. We introduce for this evaluation an in-house holographic printer that allows the recording of holographic pixel distributions at a microscopic scale. We show how these microholograms can encode angular information that overcomes the diffraction limit and could alleviate the space bandwidth constraint usually associated with conventional display design.