Light field display
A light field display (LFD) is a type of display technology designed to reproduce a light field, the distribution of light rays in 3D space, including their brightness, color, and direction.[1] This is in comparison to existing screens, even two-view stereoscopic 3D screens, that only send out one image at all angles. Light field displays aim to recreate how light naturally propagates in 3D from a real object or scene.[2] Light field displays display rays of light at a wide variety of angles. This makes it so a user's eye can focus naturally on the light generated. This allows viewers to perceive genuine depth, parallax (both horizontal and vertical), and perspective changes without special eyewear (in many implementations).[3][4]
Light field display is crucial for the future of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), because it displays images without vergence-accommodation conflicts (VACs).[5][6] Standard two-view stereoscopic systems like the Magic Leap, Hololens, and all existing 3D movies have VAC, which causes eye strain.
Light field displays can be made to be near the eye or fixed in the world: Either a near-eye lightfield display or a world-fixed lightfield display. The generated lightfield appears to have real physical depth, meaning that a person can focus on the images naturally at a range of distances in the perceived visual content.
The light reaches the viewer from multiple angles at a single viewpoint.
The light in a light field display must be pointed at many different angles. It can use a lens array to point the light in specific directions, or it can use a directional backlight or display that naturally emits directional rays of light.
A basic display can be made by stacking two lenticular sheets perpendicularly.
Lens-array based light field prototypes were created by Doug Lanman.
It is a type of multifocal display.
It can be connected to a computer to display dynamic light field imagery and graphical 3D user interface elements.
Resolution[edit]
Typically, the resolution of the human visual system is about 1 arcmin (~0.017°), which computes to ~0.23mm at a distance of 0.8 meters.[7]
A light field display can simulate vergence-accommodation conflict of earlier autostereoscopic displays.
Technology[edit]
Sequential lightfield display[edit]
A sequential light field display is a display that generates groups of rays at various focus distances one after another, and displays to the eye in rapid succession.
Sequential light field displays have been developed by Andrew Maimone and CREAL.
Microlens-based[edit]
- For detail about this topic, visit: Lens array-based light field display
A light field display can be made by putting a microlens array in front of a traditional flat display.[8] This can be done by taking a standard display like one out of a laptop computer or a smartphone and putting a microlens sheet in front of it.
A world-fixed display that uses microlenses or perpendicular lenticular sheets requires on the order of thousands to millions of different viewpoints if not using head tracking and view selection based on where the user's head is.
A challenge in engineering LFDs is that the lenslet array is a high contrast object, so the eyes tend to focus on it rather than on the virtual object that is being projected.[7]
Key Development Milestones[edit]
- 1908: Gabriel Lippmann introduces integral photography.[9]
- 1936: Andrey Gershun formalizes the light field mathematically.[10]
- 1991: Adelson and Bergen formalize the plenoptic function.[11]
- 1996: Levoy and Hanrahan publish work on light field rendering.[12]
- 2005: Stanford Multi-camera Array demonstrated for light field capture.[13]
- 2004-2008: Early computational light field displays developed (for example MIT Media Lab).[14]
- 2010-2013: Introduction of multilayer, compressive, and tensor light field display concepts.[15][2]
- 2013: NVIDIA demonstrates near-eye light field display prototype for VR.[16]
- 2015 onwards: Emergence of advanced prototypes (CREAL, Light Field Lab, PetaRay).[3][4][17]
Manufacturing[edit]
A light field display must be lit. For example using high brightness LEDs. The LEDs can be a broad backlight, or they can be the individual pixels or subpixels themselves.
Instead of using high-PPI displays, it is possible to use fiber optic image conduits to transport light from a physically larger and high resolution display in a flexible way to a head-mounted apparatus, where microlensing can take place for light field generation.
Companies[edit]
References[edit]
- ↑ Wetzstein G. (2020). “Computational Displays: Achieving the Full Plenoptic Function.” ACM SIGGRAPH 2020 Courses. ACM Digital Library. doi:10.1145/3386569.3409414. Available: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3386569.3409414 (accessed 3 May 2025).
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Wetzstein, G., Lanman, D., Hirsch, M., & Raskar, R. (2012). Tensor displays: Compressive light field synthesis using multilayer displays with directional backlighting. ACM Transactions on Graphics, 31(4), Article 80. doi:10.1145/2185520.2185576
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Looking Glass Factory. Looking Glass 27″ Light Field Display. Retrieved from https://lookingglassfactory.com/looking-glass-27
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Hollister, S. (2024, January 19). Leia is building a 3D empire on the back of the worst phone we've ever reviewed. The Verge. Retrieved from https://www.theverge.com/24036574/leia-glasses-free-3d-ces-2024
- ↑ Zhang, S. (2015, August 11). The Obscure Neuroscience Problem That's Plaguing VR. WIRED. Retrieved from https://www.wired.com/2015/08/obscure-neuroscience-problem-thats-plaguing-vr
- ↑ Y. Zhou, J. Zhang, F. Fang, “Vergence-accommodation conflict in optical see-through display: Review and prospect,” *Results in Optics*, vol. 5, p. 100160, 2021, doi:10.1016/j.rio.2021.100160.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 https://web.archive.org/web/20180101203430/http://www.fovi3d.com/technology/
- ↑ "Near-Eye Light Field Displays". https://research.nvidia.com/sites/default/files/pubs/2013-11_Near-Eye-Light-Field/NVIDIA-NELD.pdf.
- ↑ Lippmann, G. (1908). Épreuves réversibles donnant la sensation du relief. Journal de Physique Théorique et Appliquée, 7(1), 821–825. doi:10.1051/jphystap:019080070082100
- ↑ Gershun, A. (1936). The Light Field. Moscow. (Translated by P. Moon & G. Timoshenko, 1939, Journal of Mathematics and Physics, XVIII, 51–151).
- ↑ Adelson, E. H., & Bergen, J. R. (1991). The plenoptic function and the elements of early vision. In M. Landy & J. A. Movshon (Eds.), Computational Models of Visual Processing (pp. 3–20). MIT Press.
- ↑ Levoy, M., & Hanrahan, P. (1996). Light field rendering. Proceedings of the 23rd annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques (SIGGRAPH '96), 31-42. doi:10.1145/237170.237193
- ↑ Wilburn, B., Joshi, N., Vaish, V., Talvala, E. V., Antunez, E., Barth, A., Adams, A., Horowitz, M., & Levoy, M. (2005). High performance imaging using large camera arrays. ACM SIGGRAPH 2005 Papers (SIGGRAPH '05), 765-776. doi:10.1145/1186822.1073256
- ↑ Matusik, W., & Pfister, H. (2004). 3D TV: a scalable system for real-time acquisition, transmission, and autostereoscopic display of dynamic scenes. ACM SIGGRAPH 2004 Papers (SIGGRAPH '04), 814–824. doi:10.1145/1186562.1015805
- ↑ Lanman, D., Hirsch, M., Kim, Y., & Raskar, R. (2010). Content-adaptive parallax barriers: optimizing dual-layer 3D displays using low-rank light field factorization. ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2010 papers (SIGGRAPH ASIA '10), Article 163. doi:10.1145/1882261.1866191
- ↑ Lanman, D., & Luebke, D. (2013). Near-Eye Light Field Displays (Technical Report NVR-2013-004). NVIDIA Research. Retrieved from https://research.nvidia.com/sites/default/files/pubs/2013-11_Near-Eye-Light-Field/NVIDIA-NELD.pdf
- ↑ Lang, B. (2023, January 11). CREAL's Latest Light-field AR Demo Shows Continued Progress Toward Natural Depth & Focus. Road to VR. Retrieved from https://www.roadtovr.com/creal-light-field-ar-vr-headset-prototype/