Pepper's Ghost is a well known technique in theater productions that allows the appearance of a semitransparent and perhaps flying ghost on the stage. This technique has also been used with digital display to create a mixed reality (MR) system, where dynamic virtual objects are presented together with the static diorama. The usual pepper's ghost setup does not allow the presentation of the virtual objects in different z location. This paper describes the development of a pepper's ghost MR system that is able to display the virtual objects in varying z locations. In this implementation, we used six layers of Polymer Dispersed Liquid Crystal (PDLC) as the projection screens. By adjusting the on/off status of the PDLC layer, we were able to present objects at different depths.
In our previous paper, we proposed an augmented reality display based on the Pepper's Ghost configuration that was able to display twodimensional images on different image plane at different physical depths. In this paper, we propose the next generation of the display. Our latest display is able to display images at different physical depths simultaneously, thus it is able to display virtual objects with real depth, binocular parallax and motion parallax without the use of special glasses. Using the Pepper's Ghost setup, we are able to display real world objects and virtual objects in the same space. Furthermore, since the rendered virtual objects have real physical depth, our system does not suffer from accommodation and convergence mismatch problem. We will describe the hardware setup, software system, and follow with two user evaluation experiments that evaluated the result of our system.
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