Abstract
Holographic displays can generate light fields by dynamically modulating the wavefront of a coherent light beam using a spatial light modulator (SLM), promising rich virtual-reality (VR) and augmented-reality (AR) applications. However, the limited spatial resolution of existing dynamic SLMs imposes a tight bound on the diffraction angle. In work published this year, we offered a path to usable, wearable and ultrathin AR displays through neural étendue expanders. These elements, enabled by artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, can effectively increase étendue—a key performance parameter in these visual systems—by two orders of magnitude. Compared with existing state-of-the-art hand-engineered approaches, neural étendue expanders produce high-fidelity, full-color holograms for complex scenes.