Focus 3D

Abstract

We present a glasses-free 3D display design with the potential to provide viewers with nearly correct accommodative depth cues, as well as motion parallax and binocular cues. Building on multilayer attenuator and directional backlight architectures, the proposed design achieves the high angular resolution needed for accommodation by placing spatial light modulators about a large lens: one conjugate to the viewer's eye, and one or more near the plane of the lens. Nonnegative tensor factorization is used to compress a high angular resolution light field into a set of masks that can be displayed on a pair of commodity LCD panels. By constraining the tensor factorization to preserve only those light rays seen by the viewer, we effectively steer narrow high resolution viewing cones into the user's eyes, allowing binocular disparity, motion parallax, and the potential for nearly correct accommodation over a wide field of view. We verify the design experimentally by focusing a camera at different depths about a prototype display, establish formal upper bounds on the design's accommodation range and diffraction-limited performance, and discuss practical limitations that must be overcome to allow the device to be used with human observers.

36.1: Wide Field of View Compressive Light Field Display using a Multilayer Architecture and Tracked Viewers

“…In particular, compressive light field displays [4,12] use modern matrix and tensor factorization algorithms to enhance image brightness and reduce the requirements on display refresh rates as compared to conventional time-multiplexing techniques. Whereas most existing 3D displays are limited to binocular depth cues, compressive light field displays have also demonstrated support for eye accommodation [6].…”

“…Current display designs dictate a tradeoff on achievable field of view: image resolution must be degraded [1] or display refresh rates must be increased [3,9] to widen the field of view. Whereas most compressive light field display architectures have thus far only demonstrated limited fields of view [2,4,5,11,12], head and eye tracking has been shown to allow for more flexible display modes in some configurations [6,7]. However, these existing tracked works [6,7] have not demonstrated a real-time, wide field of view display system that operates in high resolution.…”

“…Whereas most compressive light field display architectures have thus far only demonstrated limited fields of view [2,4,5,11,12], head and eye tracking has been shown to allow for more flexible display modes in some configurations [6,7]. However, these existing tracked works [6,7] have not demonstrated a real-time, wide field of view display system that operates in high resolution.…”

“…Although these shortcomings can be alleviated using multiple stacked layers or directional backlighting [6,12], this is either optically less efficient (stacks of LCDs block a lot of light) or more challenging to engineer. In this paper, we propose a simple technique to significantly increase the perceived field of view of a dual-layer display for a single observer by flexibly steering a small field of view directly towards the observer.…”

“…By combining unconventional optical setups, such as multilayer LCDs [2,4,5,8,11] or directional backlights [6,12], with compressive computation, these types of displays support unprecedented image resolution and 3D capabilities using commodity hardware. The key idea behind all of these displays is to directly exploit the compressibility of the presented light field image content.…”