Glasses-free three-dimensional (3D) displays are one of the game-changing technologies that will redefine the display industry in portable electronic devices. However, because of the limited resolution in state-of-the-art display panels, current 3D displays suffer from a critical trade-off among the spatial resolution, angular resolution, and viewing angle. Inspired by the so-called spatially variant resolution imaging found in vertebrate eyes, we propose 3D display with spatially variant information density. Stereoscopic experiences with smooth motion parallax are maintained at the central view, while the viewing angle is enlarged at the periphery view. It is enabled by a large-scale 2D-metagrating complex to manipulate dot/linear/rectangular hybrid shaped views. Furthermore, a video rate full-color 3D display with an unprecedented 160° horizontal viewing angle is demonstrated. With thin and light form factors, the proposed 3D system can be integrated with off-the-shelf purchased flat panels, making it promising for applications in portable electronics.

The depth of focus (DOF) of a lens is a crucial parameter in glasses-free 3D displays that affects the viewing distance range. Here we proposed a vector light field display based on intertwined flat lens for extended viewing distance. The gray-scale diffractive lens (GDL) is designed and fabricated with extended DOF for red (658 nm), green (532 nm), and blue (450 nm) colors. By integrating the intertwined GDLs with a liquid crystal display, four views form a smooth horizontal parallax with a cross talk below 26% over a viewing distance from 24 to 90 cm. The enhancement of the DOF is 1.8 × 1 0 4 -fold. The light efficiency of the pixelated GDL reaches 82%. The proposed vector light field 3D display has the advantages of a thin form factor, high efficiency, high color fidelity, and large viewing distance. The potential applications include portable electronics, 3D TVs, and tabletop displays.

Flexible transparent electrodes (FTEs) with high stability and scalability are in high demand for the extremely widespread applications in flexible optoelectronic devices. Traditionally, thin films of indium thin oxide (ITO) served the role of FTEs, but film brittleness and scarcity of materials limit its further application. This review provides a summary of recent advances in emerging transparent electrodes and related flexible devices (e.g., touch panels, organic light-emitting diodes, sensors, supercapacitors, and solar cells). Mainly focusing on the FTEs based on carbon nanomaterials (e.g., carbon nanotubes and graphene) and metal materials (e.g., metal grid and metal nanowires), we discuss the fabrication techniques, the performance improvement, and the representative applications of these highly transparent and flexible electrodes. Finally, the challenges and prospects of flexible transparent electrodes will be summarized.

Glasses-free three-dimensional (3D) display is considered as a potential disruptive technology for display. The issue of visual fatigue, mainly caused by the inaccurate phase reconstruction in terms of image crosstalk, as well as vergence and accommodation conflict, is the critical obstacle that hinders the real applications of glasses-free 3D display. Here we propose a glasses-free 3D display by adopting metagratings for the pixelated phase modulation to form converged viewpoints. When the viewpoints are closely arranged, the holographic sampling 3D display can approximate a continuous light field. We demonstrate a video rate full-color 3D display prototype without visual fatigue under an LED white light illumination. The metagratings-based holographic sampling 3D display has a thin form factor and is compatible with traditional flat panel and thus has the potential to be used in portable electronics, window display, exhibition display, 3D TV, as well as tabletop display.

Without any special glasses, multiview 3D displays based on the diffractive optics can present high resolution, full-parallax 3D images in an ultra-wide viewing angle. The enabling optical component, namely the phase plate, can produce arbitrarily distributed view zones by carefully designing the orientation and the period of each nano-grating pixel. However, such 3D display screen is restricted to a limited size due to the time-consuming fabricating process of nano-gratings on the phase plate. In this paper, we proposed and developed a lithography system that can fabricate the phase plate efficiently. Here we made two phase plates with full nano-grating pixel coverage at a speed of 20 mm²/mins, a 500 fold increment in the efficiency when compared to the method of E-beam lithography. One 2.5-inch phase plate generated 9-view 3D images with horizontal-parallax, while the other 6-inch phase plate produced 64-view 3D images with full-parallax. The angular divergence in horizontal axis and vertical axis was 1.5 degrees, and 1.25 degrees, respectively, slightly larger than the simulated value of 1.2 degrees by Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD). The intensity variation was less than 10% for each viewpoint, in consistency with the simulation results. On top of each phase plate, a high-resolution binary masking pattern containing amplitude information of all viewing zone was well aligned. We achieved a resolution of 400 pixels/inch and a viewing angle of 40 degrees for 9-view 3D images with horizontal parallax. In another prototype, the resolution of each view was 160 pixels/inch and the view angle was 50 degrees for 64-view 3D images with full parallax. As demonstrated in the experiments, the homemade lithography system provided the key fabricating technology for multiview 3D holographic display.

Limited by the refreshable data volume of commercial spatial light modulator (SLM), electronic holography can hardly provide satisfactory 3D live video. Here we propose a holography based multiview 3D display by separating the phase information of a lightfield from the amplitude information. In this paper, the phase information was recorded by a 5.5-inch 4-view phase plate with a full coverage of pixelated nano-grating arrays. Because only amplitude information need to be updated, the refreshing data volume in a 3D video display was significantly reduced. A 5.5 inch TFT-LCD with a pixel size of 95 μm was used to modulate the amplitude information of a lightfield at a rate of 20 frames per second. To avoid crosstalk between viewing points, the spatial frequency and orientation of each nano-grating in the phase plate was fine tuned. As a result, the transmission light converged to the viewing points. The angular divergence was measured to be 1.02 degrees (FWHM) by average, slightly larger than the diffraction limit of 0.94 degrees. By refreshing the LCD, a series of animated sequential 3D images were dynamically presented at 4 viewing points. The resolution of each view was 640 × 360. Images for each viewing point were well separated and no ghost images were observed. The resolution of the image and the refreshing rate in the 3D dynamic display can be easily improved by employing another SLM. The recoded 3D videos showed the great potential of the proposed holographic 3D display to be used in mobile electronics.