Design and implementation of a DMD based volumetric 3D display

A real image swept-volume volumetric display is developed. A piston type moving screen is used to obtain the desired volume. A commercially available DMD device is used to project 2D slices of a 3D frame. There is a varying magnification effect during the projection because of the optical design of the system; raw 3D video frames are processed by a software to generate the appropriate 2D slices by also correcting the magnification. Synchronization between the hardware and the software is achieved via a microcontroller. The overall system is capable of printing 12 3D frames per second where a 3D frame consists of 90 2D slices with a resolution varying from 512x512 to 450x450 (approx. 20M voxels per one 3D frame). Although some flickering effect is observed due to rather low 3D frame rate, results are visually satisfactory. ©2008 IEEE.