Abstract

The pocket-sized liquid crystal televisions recently marketed by several Japanese companies have been welcome gifts among friends and found useful in applications such as the view-finders in video cameras. Many optical processing researchers have also begun to use these devices as a spatial light modulators (SLM's) in a variety of ways. It has been demonstrated that LCTV's can be used as optical input devices, logic elements, computer generated hologram recordings, and 2-D phase image representations. The LCTV may be used for these processing applications because it has several attractive features. For example, it is electronically addressable through a microcomputer, and since it is a TV by design, it is naturally addressable by a TV camera and it can be refreshed at a speed of 30 Hz. By definition, when the LCTV is used as a SLM, it can be controlled remotely by an emitting antenna anywhere in the world. So one can imagine that a joint experiment on optical processing could be performed by researchers from Asia, Europe, and the United States through the TV transmitter and receiver linkage. The speed of 30 frames/sec. is sufficient for the present usage because the inputting of image signals from a computer can hardly exceed this speed.

© 1988 Optical Society of America