Head-mounted displays (HMDs) and augmented reality (AR) are actively being studied. However, ordinary AR HMDs for visual assistance have a problem in which users have difficulty simultaneously focusing their eyes on both the real target object and the displayed image because the image can only be displayed at a fixed distance from an user's eyes in contrast to where the real object three-dimensionally exists. Therefore, we considered incorporating a holographic technology, an ideal three-dimensional (3D) display technology, into an AR HMD system. A few studies on holographic HMDs have had technical problems, and they have faults in size and weight. This paper proposes a compact holographic AR HMD system with the purpose of enabling an ideal 3D AR HMD system which can correctly reconstruct the image at any depth. In this paper, a Fourier transform optical system (FTOS) was implemented using only one lens in order to achieve a compact and lightweight structure, and a compact holographic AR HMD system was constructed. The experimental results showed that the proposed system can reconstruct sharp images at the correct depth for a wide depth range. This study enabled an ideal 3D AR HMD system that enables simultaneous viewing of both the real target object and the reconstructed image without feeling visual fatigue.

The visual reality of a holographic image has improved effectively by utilizing multicolor reconstruction procedure. This fact is applicable to a real-time three-dimensional display for a computer generated hologram (CGH). However, it is quite difficult to generate a CGH for multicolor imaging in real-time because a CGH contains essentially a huge amount of information, and increases further information produced by multiplying the number of primary colors for multicolor imaging. Moreover, the optical system is considerably complicated for the multicolor image reconstruction. In this paper, a new method is presented to reconstruct a three dimensional multicolor image from a CGH. In this method, three sub-holograms to reconstruct the primary color images are sampled respectively for reducing the amount of computation and realizing a simple optical system. Fringe patterns are displayed by only one spatial light modulator (SLM) and color crosstalk images are eliminated by a color filtering system for ensuring that each sub-hologram can be only illuminated by the light with an appropriate color. A multicolor imaging method from a CGH is proposed and also the experimental results are shown.