The Varrier ^TM autostereoscopic virtual reality display

Abstract

Virtual reality (VR) has long been hampered by the gear needed to make the experience possible; specifically, stereo glasses and tracking devices. Autostereoscopic display devices are gaining popularity by freeing the user from stereo glasses, however few qualify as VR displays. The Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) has designed and produced a large scale, high resolution headtracked barrier-strip autostereoscopic display system that produces a VR immersive experience without requiring the user to wear any encumbrances. The resulting system, called Varrier, is a passive parallax barrier 35-panel tiled display that produces a wide field of view, head-tracked VR experience. This paper presents background material related to parallax barrier autostereoscopy, provides system configuration and construction details, examines Varrier interleaving algorithms used to produce the stereo images, introduces calibration and testing, and discusses the camera-based tracking subsystem.

A compressive light field projection system

“…Gabriel Lippmann [1908] and Frederic Ives [1903] were the first to discover how arrays of lenslets or pinholes can be used to synthesize a light field. These technologies have evolved into head-tracked [Perlin et al 2000] and largescale multi-monitor [Sandin et al 2005] systems. However, one of the main shortcomings of these approaches is the loss of image resolution-spatial resolution is traded for angular light field resolution.…”

HyFinBall: A Two-Handed, Hybrid 2D/3D Desktop VR Interface for Visualization

“…Markerless, head-tracked, auto-stereo displays has been demonstrated [58]. Non-encumbering input further implies using held devices and/or using gloveless hand and finger tracking which precludes haptic feedback.…”

The Cloud-Mobile Convergence Paradigm for Augmented Reality

“…Building on this hardware configuration, the synergy among the cluster nodes ensures that pixel rendering across all the tiles are coordinated to provide the user with a large "single" screen experience. Cluster-driven large displays can be a projection-based wall (Mechdyne, 2008), flat panel-based wall (Jeong et al, 2006;Sandin et al, 2005;Sandstrom et al, 2003) or flat panel-based tabletop (Krumbholz et al, 2005). Two detailed reviews of recent progress on large displays can be found in (Wallace et al, 2005) and (Ni et al, 2006).…”

“…In the mean time, the CPU performance of each node is growing exponentially with Moore's Law. For example, Varrier (Sandin et al, 2005), a 35-tile system uses an 18-node cluster. While Hyperwall (Sandstrom et al, 2003), a 49-tile system uses a 49-node cluster.…”