New Optical Approach Paves the Way for High-Resolution Large-Scale Glasses-Free 3D Displays
Proof-of-concept projector proves capable of a 36-fold increase in display size and can operate in real-time.
A team of engineers from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Seoul National University have come up with a method of producing ultra-high-definition 3D displays that don't rely on special glasses to produce their effect.
"Our optical design could make it practical to replace 2D flat panel displays with 3D images for digital signs, entertainment, education, and other applications where 3D images provide a significant enhancement," says research lead Byoungho Lee of the team's work. "Our design could also be modified to provide immersive experiences in movie theaters, for example."
What Lee and colleagues have created is a light-field projection display, based on existing technologies — but doing away with the problem of scaling the resolution, where the amount of data required for each increase in display resolution quickly becomes unmanageable.
"We developed a way to carry out all the display processes optically without any digital processing," Lee explains. "This compensates for the limitations of each display technology to allow the creation of high-resolution 3D images on a large screen."
The team's approach combines the approaches of multifocal displays, which offer a high resolution but struggle to scale to large form factors, and integral imaging that is usually lower resolution but easier to scale up in size. The multifocal display is responsible for producing a high-resolution 3D image, which is then enlarged through integral imaging.
"Our method goes beyond merely combining two existing methods to achieving an ultra-high-definition volumetric light-field display with almost diffraction-limited resolution," Lee claims. "We also found a way to effectively resolve the difficulty of enlarging a volumetric scene and overcame problems with information loss that tend to affect integral imaging."
To prove the concept, the team produced a prototype capable of synthesizing a volumetric image measuring 8.4" x 8.4" x 12.6" — a 36-fold increase in size over the original image and an equivalent resolution to 28.6 megapixels in a traditional two-dimensional display. The approach can operate in real-time, Lee claims, and doesn't require 3D glasses in order to view the image.
The teams work has been published under open-access terms in the journal Optics Letters.