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.

Learned hardware-in-the-loop phase retrieval for holographic near-eye displays

“…Several recent near-eye display designs employ holographic projectors and/or holographic optical elements (HOE) to achieve a compact form factor. While most of the designs rely on a single phase-only spatial light modulator (SLM) [Chen and Chu 2015], configurations using two phase SLMs [Levin et al 2016], or a combination of both amplitude and phase SLMs [Shi et al 2017] have also been explored. Although the proposed holographic benchtop prototypes are large and bulky, many recent works have proposed ways forward to achieve compact form factors.…”

Exponentially-wide étendue displays using a tilting cascade

“…SLMs have a wide range of applications beyond the ones demonstrated in this paper. Piecewise linear phase modulators which expand the tilting range of these SLM can offer significant advances for many other tasks, such as multifocal displays [20], light sensitive displays [14], [22], Focal Surface displays [21], and high dynamic range displays [25], [26]. While these applications require large tilt angles, many of them involve piecewise smooth slopes as supported by our display, rather than highly varying phases.…”

“…The light arriving at the SLM plane is not necessarily generated by some back illumination of the display, but can utilize any form of energy received from the environment as a light sensitive display [14], [22]. These displays aim to mimic the BRDF and other light sensitive variations of materials in the real world.…”

Towards occlusion-aware multifocal displays

“…Maimone et al [2017] create hologram for virtual/augmented reality displays. Levin et al [2016] use two phase SLMs to create a passive viewpoint-sensitive display. Damberg et al [2016] create goal-based caustics with a phase SLM to increase the contrast of a high-dynamic-range projector.…”