Real-time per-pixel predistortion for head-tracked light field displays

Abstract

The latest light-field displays (LFDs) have improved greatly with head tracking but continue to be based on the approximate pinhole model, meaning that cross-talk is often visible at large viewing angles and when virtual objects are distant from the display panel. To address these problems, our real-time LFD technique evaluates a full optical model for every frame and then displays an image predistorted during ray-traced rendering at the subpixel level to the current pixel-to-eye light flow, reducing cross-talk and increasing viewing angle. A comparison to imagery produced with the pinhole model shows clear advantages for our LFD technique, and in a user study with interactive, head-tracked display of several different scenes, viewers reported a significant preference for our novel LFD technique. Our unoptimized prototype implementation is already real time, and as GPUs improve in performance and ray tracing becomes increasingly common, we expect that our LFD technique will be easy to add to a variety of 3D applications, including games.