Holographic displays offer significant potential for augmented and virtual reality applications by reconstructing wavefronts that enable continuous depth cues and natural parallax without vergence–accommodation conflict. However, despite advances in pixel-level image quality, current systems struggle to achieve perceptually accurate color reproduction–an essential component of visual realism. These challenges arise from complex system-level distortions caused by coherent laser illumination, spatial light modulator imperfections, chromatic aberrations, and camera-induced color biases. In this work, we propose a perceptually-aware color management framework for holographic displays that jointly addresses input–output color inconsistencies through color space transformation, adaptive illumination control, and neural network–based perceptual modeling of the camera’s color response. We validate the effectiveness of our approach through numerical simulations, optical experiments, and a controlled user study. The results demonstrate substantial improvements in perceptual color fidelity, laying the groundwork for perceptually driven holographic rendering in future systems.

In this paper, we present a holographic display using a light pipe for augmented reality, and the hologram rendering method via bandwidth-preserved kaleidoscopic guiding method. Conventional augmented reality displays typically share optical architectures where the light engine and image combiner are adjacent. Minimizing the size of both components is highly challenging, and most commercial and research prototypes of augmented reality displays are bulky, front-heavy and sight-obstructing. Here, we propose the use of light pipe to decouple and spatially reposition the light engine from the image combiner, enabling a pragmatic glasses-type design. Through total internal reflection, light pipes have an advantage in guiding the full angular bandwidth regardless of its length. By modeling such kaleidoscopic guiding of the wavefront inside the light pipe and applying it to holographic image generation, we successfully separate the light engine from the image combiner, making the front of the device clear and lightweight. We experimentally validate that the proposed light pipe system delivers virtual images with high-quality and 3D depth cues. We further present a method to simulate and compensate for light pipe misalignment, enhancing the robustness and practicality of the proposed system.

Holographic near-eye displays are a promising technology to solve long-standing challenges in virtual and augmented reality display systems. Over the last few years, many different computer-generated holography (CGH) algorithms have been proposed that are supervised by different types of target content, such as 2.5D RGB-depth maps, 3D focal stacks, and 4D light fields. It is unclear, however, what the perceptual implications are of the choice of algorithm and target content type. In this work, we build a perceptual testbed of a full-color, high-quality holographic near-eye display. Under natural viewing conditions, we examine the effects of various CGH supervision formats and conduct user studies to assess their perceptual impacts on 3D realism. Our results indicate that CGH algorithms designed for specific viewpoints exhibit noticeable deficiencies in achieving 3D realism. In contrast, holograms incorporating parallax cues consistently outperform other formats across different viewing conditions, including the center of the eyebox. This finding is particularly interesting and suggests that the inclusion of parallax cues in CGH rendering plays a crucial role in enhancing the overall quality of the holographic experience. This work represents an initial stride towards delivering a perceptually realistic 3D experience with holographic near-eye displays.

The evolution of computer-generated holography (CGH) algorithms has prompted significant improvements in the performances of holographic displays. Nonetheless, they start to encounter a limited degree of freedom in CGH optimization and physical constraints stemming from the coherent nature of holograms. To surpass the physical limitations, we consider polarization as a new degree of freedom by utilizing a novel optical platform called metasurface. Polarization-multiplexing metasurfaces enable incoherent-like behavior in holographic displays due to the mutual incoherence of orthogonal polarization states. We leverage this unique characteristic of a metasurface by integrating it into a holographic display and exploiting polarization diversity to bring an additional degree of freedom for CGH algorithms. To minimize the speckle noise while maximizing the image quality, we devise a fully differentiable optimization pipeline by taking into account the metasurface proxy model, thereby jointly optimizing spatial light modulator phase patterns and geometric parameters of metasurface nanostructures. We evaluate the metasurface-enabled depolarized holography through simulations and experiments, demonstrating its ability to reduce speckle noise and enhance image quality.

Holographic displays have gained unprecedented attention as next-generation virtual and augmented reality applications with recent achievements in the realization of a high-contrast image through computer-generated holograms (CGHs). However, these holograms show a high energy concentration in a limited angular spectrum, whereas the holograms with uniformly distributed angular spectrum suffer from a severe speckle noise in the reconstructed images. In this study, we claim that these two physical phenomena attributed to the existing CGHs significantly limit the support of accommodation cues, which is known as one of the biggest advantages of holographic displays. To support the statement, we analyze and evaluate various CGH algorithms with contrast gradients - a change of contrast over the change of the focal diopter of the eye - simulated based on the optical configuration of the display system and human visual perception models. We first introduce two approaches to improve monocular accommodation response in holographic viewing experience; optical and computational approaches to provide holographic images with sufficient contrast gradients. We design and conduct user experiments with our prototype of holographic near-eye displays, validating the deficient support of accommodation cues in the existing CGH algorithms and demonstrating the feasibility of the proposed solutions with significant improvements on accommodative gains.