Dielectric and plasmonic metasurfaces provide excellent control over the shaping of optical wavefronts via the manipulation of polarisation, phase and amplitude of the light. Taking advantage of their subwavelength thicknesses, metasurfaces are a very promising technology in a variety of applications including beam steering and focusing, polarisation and angular momentum control. Recently, holographic information encoding for 3D displays using metasurfaces has also been of interest, creating effective techniques for the 2D visualisation of 3D objects. Normal mapping, for example, is widely used in computer graphics to create shading effects and recreate 3D-like features of surface textures. Here, we report on the development of the concept of surface normal mapping for the representation of 3D objects and shading effects with optical metasurfaces. In this work, the metasurface is designed to implement diffuse reflection and uses the concept of normal mapping to control its scattering properties. As a proof of principle, a flat diffuse metasurface imitating lighting and shading effects of a 3D cube was characterised under incoherent illumination. The “3D image” is displayed directly on the illuminated metasurface and its shading varies in response to the change in illumination angle. The metasurface performs in a broad range of the visible spectrum, including the three RGB wavelengths. The 3D images created via normal mapping based on optical metasurfaces provide an effective technology for 3D security features and anti-counterfeiting. This type of metasurfaces can also be useful in the design of efficient optical diffusers for display technology and etalons for metrology.
Access to the requested content is limited to institutions that have purchased or subscribe to SPIE eBooks.
You are receiving this notice because your organization may not have SPIE eBooks access.*
*Shibboleth/Open Athens users─please
sign in
to access your institution's subscriptions.
To obtain this item, you may purchase the complete book in print or electronic format on
SPIE.org.
INSTITUTIONAL Select your institution to access the SPIE Digital Library.
PERSONAL Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.