Adaptive viewing distance in super multi-view displays using aperiodic 3-D pixel location and dynamic view indices

Abstract

In the 3-D display field, super multi-view (SMV) technology has drawn keen attention owing to its advanced 3-D features: smooth motion parallax, wide depth of focus, and a possibility of visual discomfort alleviation. Nevertheless, its applications are limited because of narrow viewing lobes (VLs), unavoidable to prevent an excessive decrease of the lateral resolution. To expand VLs, many head-tracked multi-view display technologies have been developed for decades, but restrictive viewing distance (VD) still remains as one of the most critical drawbacks of SMV technology. This paper proposes a novel method that can adjust the optimal VD (OVD) in flat-panel-based SMV displays without mechanical changes or loss of multi-view properties. To this end, it exploits partially aperiodically located sets of subpixels for defining 3-D pixels and dynamically changing view indices for the 3-D pixels. This enables that the front and rear bounds of initial VDs are adjustable, and VLs are dynamically expandable when a target OVD is renewed in real time using head-tracking. In the experiments, the quantitative VL expansion and qualitative quality of perceptual images are compared, and the feasibility of supporting adaptive VD in real time is further investigated. In addition, our prototype head-tracked SMV system is also introduced as an advanced application towards omnidirectionally free VL. ？ 2018 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement