Visually Equivalent Light Field 3-D for Portable Displays

Highly realistic 3-D displays that can reproduce object images to look like physical objects are utilized for natural and correct remote operation in industrial scenes. Therefore, we developed a visually equivalent light field 3-D (VELF3D) display that can produce highly realistic, accurate images with a high resolution and a smooth, accurate motion parallax. However, the observation distance is slightly long, and users cannot reach the displayed images. Therefore, we aim to develop a tablet-computer-type VELF3D display that enables users to touch the displayed objects. The display viewpoint density has been increased to achieve a shorter observation distance, while maintaining the display depth range. Because higher resolutions are required for a close observation distance and increased display viewpoints, we aimed to improve the effective resolution using almost the same pixel pitch display panel. Therefore, we built a prototype that combines a vertical red, green, blue stripe display panel and a parallax barrier with subpixel width slits. We confirmed effective resolution improvement by tiny subjective tests. This method also helps increase the depth range of the display when it is observed from a normal distance.