Disclosed are improved beam steering and scanning devices which utilize
cholesteric liquid crystal (CLC) elements arranged in branches to form a logic
tree structure. Each branch thereof comprises an active and passive CLC element;
the former further comprising a half-wave retarder and an electrode and the latter
only the CLC element. Each succeeding branch contains twice as many branches as
a preceding branch and, by activating active CLC element electrodes under control
of a programmable pulsed source, inputs applied to the first stage of a logic tree
are delivered as a scanned line of electromagnetic energy or light to the imaging
cells of the last stage of the logic tree. By stacking identical logic tree structures
with a laser source for each tree, a flat panel imaging array or display panel
is formed in which the transmission intensity losses are minimized. The resulting
system can be used to produce 2-D and 3-D images by applying a modulation to the
laser sources from standard television cameras, and cameras designed to capture
stereo-displaced images, respectively.
