Introduction:
In 2018, the authors presented a new platform for volumetric display using photophoretic trapping. This display operates by first confining a particle in a photophoretic trap which then drags the particle through every active image point in a freespace volume. In the current prototype, this volume is typically 1 cm3. As the particle is dragged through space, it is illuminated by visible lasers to form an image by persistence of vision. The volume must be redrawn more than ten times a second to be above the flicker rate of the eye. The most immediate current challenges to bring the display into the realm of practicality are (1) to scale the display volume from 1 cm3 to greater than 100 cm3 and (2) to employ parallel traps to address the fundamental incapacity of freespace volumetric displays to create virtual images. Our efforts to address the former challenge will be reported in another publication. Instead, this work focuses on the latter challenge, the challenge of simulating virtual images with freespace volumetric hardware.
