Toward the Light Field Display: Autostereoscopic Rendering via a Cluster of Projectors

Abstract

Ultimately, a display device should be capable of reproducing the visual effects that are produced by reality. In this paper we introduce an autostereoscopic display that uses a scalable array of digital light projectors and a projection screen augmented with microlenses to simulate a light field for a given three-dimensional scene. Physical objects emit or reflect light in all directions to create a light field that can be approximated by the light field display. The display can simultaneously provide many viewers from different viewpoints a stereoscopic effect without head-tracking or special mechanical devices. We present a solution to automatically calibrate the light field display and an efficient algorithm to render the special multi-view images it requires by exploiting their spatial coherence. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated with a four-projector prototype that can display dynamic imagery with full parallax.