Passive light and viewpoint sensitive display of 3D content

Abstract

We present a 3D light-sensitive display. The display is capable of presenting simple opaque 3D surfaces without self occlusions, while reproducing both viewpoint-sensitive depth parallax and illumination-sensitive variations such as shadows and highlights. Our display is passive in the sense that it does not rely on illumination sensors and on-the-fly rendering of the image content. Rather, it consists of optical elements that produce light transport paths approximating those present in the real scene. Our display uses two layers of Spatial Light Modulators (SLMs) whose micron-sized elements allow us to digitally simulate thin optical surfaces with flexible shapes. We derive a simple content creation algorithm utilizing geometric optics tools to design optical surfaces that can mimic the ray transfer of target virtual 3D scenes. We demonstrate a possible implementation of a small prototype, and present a number of simple virtual 3D scenes.