Novel materials and devices bring new opportunities for holographic display

Three-dimentional (3D) display is one of the effective ways to obtain visual information feeling like actual environment. Since holographic technique can provide full depth information for human eyes, it is considered to be an ideal 3D display technique. However, it is limited by the features of display elements and devices, such as the time-space (time and space) bandwidth product, massive data processing speed and low image quality and so on. To improve the display quality, expand the time-space bandwidth product, improve the performance of the system, and overcome the limitation, optical elements and devices made from novel materials are introduced, such as metamaterials, metasurfaces and two-dimensional (2D) materials, and thus bringing new challenges and opportunities to holographic display. Metaatom structure whose unit size is much less than wavelength is designed and fabricated specially, and it can realize the isotropical or anisotropical manipulation of the amplitude and phase of the light wave. By encoding the meta-atom structures into the hologram, the 2D or 3D images can be achieved. The development of a refreshable metamaterials and their applications in dynamic holographic display will be one of the most important topics in the future. Though the 2D or 3D holographic displays based on the elements and devices made from novel materials still have some basic problems, it is expected that they would bring new impetus and promising perspective for the future display market.