Autostereoscopy
Encyclopedia
Autostereoscopy is any method of displaying stereoscopic
images (adding binocular
perception of 3D depth) without the use of special headgear or glasses on the part of the viewer. Because headgear is not required, it is also called "glasses-free 3D" or "glassesless 3D". There are two broad approaches currently used to accommodate motion parallax and wider viewing angles: eye-tracking, and multiple views so that the display does not need to sense where the viewers' eyes are located.
Examples of autostereoscopic displays include parallax barrier, lenticular, volumetric, electro-holographic, and light field displays.
s, ranging from experimental displays in university departments to commercial products, and using a range of different technologies.
The method of creating autostereoscopic 3D using lenses was mainly developed by Reinhard Boerner at the Heinrich Hertz Institute (HHI) in Berlin from 1985.
The HHI was already presenting prototypes of single-viewer displays in the 1990s. Nowadays, this technology has been developed further mainly by European companies.
One of the best-known 3D displays developed by HHI was the Free2C, a display with very high resolution and very good comfort achieved by an eye tracking
system and a seamless mechanical adjustment of the lenses.
Eye tracking
has been used in a variety of systems in order to limit the number of displayed views to just two, or to enlarge the stereoscopic sweet spot
. However, as this limits the display to a single viewer, it is not favored for consumer products.
Currently, most flat-panel solutions employ lenticular lens
es or parallax barriers that redirect incoming imagery to several viewing regions at a lower resolution. When the viewer's head is in a certain position, a different image is seen with each eye, giving a convincing illusion of 3D. Such displays can have multiple viewing zones allowing multiple users to view the image at the same time, though they may also exhibit dead zones where only a non-stereoscopic, pseudoscopic, or no image at all can be seen.
, who made and exhibited the first known functional autostereoscopic image in 1901. About two years later, Ives began selling specimen images as novelties, the first known commercial use. Nearly a century later, Sharp
developed the electronic flat-panel application of this old technology to commercialization, briefly selling two laptops with the world's only 3D LCD screens. These displays are no longer available from Sharp but still being manufactured and further developed from other companies like Tridelity and SpatialView. Similarly, Hitachi has released the first 3D mobile phone for the Japanese market under distribution by KDDI. In 2009, Fujifilm released the Fujifilm FinePix Real 3D W1
digital camera, which featured a built-in autostereoscopic LCD display measuring 2.8" diagonal. Nintendo
has also implemented this technology on their latest portable gaming console, the Nintendo 3DS
.
in 1908. Integral photography is capable of creating window-like autostereoscopic displays that reproduce objects and scenes life-size, with full parallax and perspective shift and even the depth cue of accommodation, but the full realization of this potential requires a very large number of very small high-quality optical systems and very high bandwidth. Only relatively crude photographic and video implementations have yet been produced.
One-dimensional arrays of cylindrical lens
es were patented by Walter Hess in 1912. By replacing the line and space pairs in a simple parallax barrier with tiny cylindrical lenses, Hess avoided the light loss that dimmed images viewed by transmitted light and made prints on paper unacceptably dark. An additional benefit was that the position of the observer was less restricted, as the substitution of lenses was geometrically equivalent to narrowing the spaces in a line-and-space barrier.
Philips solved a significant problem with these displays in the mid-1990s by slanting the cylindrical lenses with respect to the underlying pixel grid. Philips
produced its WOWvx line, based on this idea, until 2009, running up to a 2160p resolution of 3840×2160 pixel 46 viewing angles. Lenny Lipton
's company, StereoGraphics, produced displays based on the same idea, citing a much earlier patent for the slanted lenticulars. Magnetic3d and Zero Creative have also been involved. The hardware overlay for iPhone
and iPod touch
named 3DeeSlide also adopts this technology to convert the standard screen into an auto 3D display.
has developed a holographic
display based on eye tracking. CubicVue exhibited a color filter pattern autostereoscopic display at the Consumer Electronics Association's i-Stage competition in 2009.
There are a variety of other autostereo systems as well, such as volumetric display
, in which the reconstructed light field occupies a true volume of space, and integral imaging
, which uses a fly's-eye lens array.
The term automultiscopic display has recently been introduced as a shorter synonym for the lengthy "multi-view autostereoscopic 3D display".
Sunny Ocean Studios, located in Singapore, has been credited with developing an automultiscopic screen that can display autostereo 3D images from 64 different reference points.
Tridelity AG, located in Germany, has been credited with developing an auto-stereoscopic display in portrait format specially designed for the signage market.
Many autostereoscopic displays are single-view displays and are thus not capable of reproducing the sense of movement parallax, except for a single viewer in systems capable of eye tracking
.
Some autostereoscopic displays, however, are multi-view displays, and are thus capable of providing the perception of left-right movement parallax.
Eight and sixteen views are typical for such displays. While it is theoretically possible to simulate the perception of up-down movement parallax, no current display systems are known to do so, and the up-down effect is widely seen as less important than left-right movement parallax. One consequence of not including parallax about both axes becomes more evident as objects increasingly distant from the plane of the display are presented, for as the viewer moves closer to or farther away from the display such objects will more obviously exhibit the effects of perspective shift about one axis but not the other, appearing variously stretched or squashed to a viewer not positioned at the optimum distance from the display.
Stereoscopy
Stereoscopy refers to a technique for creating or enhancing the illusion of depth in an image by presenting two offset images separately to the left and right eye of the viewer. Both of these 2-D offset images are then combined in the brain to give the perception of 3-D depth...
images (adding binocular
Binocular vision
Binocular vision is vision in which both eyes are used together. The word binocular comes from two Latin roots, bini for double, and oculus for eye. Having two eyes confers at least four advantages over having one. First, it gives a creature a spare eye in case one is damaged. Second, it gives a...
perception of 3D depth) without the use of special headgear or glasses on the part of the viewer. Because headgear is not required, it is also called "glasses-free 3D" or "glassesless 3D". There are two broad approaches currently used to accommodate motion parallax and wider viewing angles: eye-tracking, and multiple views so that the display does not need to sense where the viewers' eyes are located.
Examples of autostereoscopic displays include parallax barrier, lenticular, volumetric, electro-holographic, and light field displays.
Technology
Many organizations have developed autostereoscopic 3D display3D display
A 3D display is any display device capable of conveying a stereoscopic perception of 3-D depth to the viewer. The basic requirement is to present offset images that are displayed separately to the left and right eye. Both of these 2-D offset images are then combined in the brain to give the...
s, ranging from experimental displays in university departments to commercial products, and using a range of different technologies.
The method of creating autostereoscopic 3D using lenses was mainly developed by Reinhard Boerner at the Heinrich Hertz Institute (HHI) in Berlin from 1985.
The HHI was already presenting prototypes of single-viewer displays in the 1990s. Nowadays, this technology has been developed further mainly by European companies.
One of the best-known 3D displays developed by HHI was the Free2C, a display with very high resolution and very good comfort achieved by an eye tracking
Eye tracking
Eye tracking is the process of measuring either the point of gaze or the motion of an eye relative to the head. An eye tracker is a device for measuring eye positions and eye movement. Eye trackers are used in research on the visual system, in psychology, in cognitive linguistics and in product...
system and a seamless mechanical adjustment of the lenses.
Eye tracking
Eye tracking
Eye tracking is the process of measuring either the point of gaze or the motion of an eye relative to the head. An eye tracker is a device for measuring eye positions and eye movement. Eye trackers are used in research on the visual system, in psychology, in cognitive linguistics and in product...
has been used in a variety of systems in order to limit the number of displayed views to just two, or to enlarge the stereoscopic sweet spot
Sweet spot
Sweet spot may refer to:*Sweet spot *Sweet spot *Sweet spot...
. However, as this limits the display to a single viewer, it is not favored for consumer products.
Currently, most flat-panel solutions employ lenticular lens
Lenticular lens
A lenticular lens is an array of magnifying lenses, designed so that when viewed from slightly different angles, different images are magnified...
es or parallax barriers that redirect incoming imagery to several viewing regions at a lower resolution. When the viewer's head is in a certain position, a different image is seen with each eye, giving a convincing illusion of 3D. Such displays can have multiple viewing zones allowing multiple users to view the image at the same time, though they may also exhibit dead zones where only a non-stereoscopic, pseudoscopic, or no image at all can be seen.
Parallax barrier
The principle of the parallax barrier was independently invented by Auguste Berthier, who published first but produced no practical results, and by Frederic E. IvesFrederic Eugene Ives
Frederic Eugene Ives was a U.S. inventor, born at Litchfield, Connecticut. In 1874–78 he had charge of the photographic laboratory at Cornell University. He moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where in 1885 he was one of the founding members of the Photographic Society of Philadelphia...
, who made and exhibited the first known functional autostereoscopic image in 1901. About two years later, Ives began selling specimen images as novelties, the first known commercial use. Nearly a century later, Sharp
Sharp Corporation
is a Japanese multinational corporation that designs and manufactures electronic products. Headquartered in Abeno-ku, Osaka, Japan, Sharp employs more than 55,580 people worldwide as of June 2011. The company was founded in September 1912 and takes its name from one of its founder's first...
developed the electronic flat-panel application of this old technology to commercialization, briefly selling two laptops with the world's only 3D LCD screens. These displays are no longer available from Sharp but still being manufactured and further developed from other companies like Tridelity and SpatialView. Similarly, Hitachi has released the first 3D mobile phone for the Japanese market under distribution by KDDI. In 2009, Fujifilm released the Fujifilm FinePix Real 3D W1
Fujifilm FinePix Real 3D W1
The Fujifilm FinePix W Series Real 3D is a line of consumer-grade digital cameras designed to capture stereoscopic images that recreate the perception of 3-D depth, having both still and video formats while retaining standard 2D still image and movie modes...
digital camera, which featured a built-in autostereoscopic LCD display measuring 2.8" diagonal. Nintendo
Nintendo
is a multinational corporation located in Kyoto, Japan. Founded on September 23, 1889 by Fusajiro Yamauchi, it produced handmade hanafuda cards. By 1963, the company had tried several small niche businesses, such as a cab company and a love hotel....
has also implemented this technology on their latest portable gaming console, the Nintendo 3DS
Nintendo 3DS
The is a portable game console produced by Nintendo. The autostereoscopic device is able to project stereoscopic 3D effects without the use of 3D glasses or any additional accessories. The Nintendo 3DS features backward compatibility with Nintendo DS series software, including Nintendo DSi software...
.
Integral Photography and Lenticular Arrays
The principle of integral photography, which uses a two-dimensional (X-Y) array of many small lenses to capture a 3-D scene, was introduced by Gabriel LippmannGabriel Lippmann
Jonas Ferdinand Gabriel Lippmann was a Franco-Luxembourgish physicist and inventor, and Nobel laureate in physics for his method of reproducing colours photographically based on the phenomenon of interference....
in 1908. Integral photography is capable of creating window-like autostereoscopic displays that reproduce objects and scenes life-size, with full parallax and perspective shift and even the depth cue of accommodation, but the full realization of this potential requires a very large number of very small high-quality optical systems and very high bandwidth. Only relatively crude photographic and video implementations have yet been produced.
One-dimensional arrays of cylindrical lens
Cylindrical lens
A cylindrical lens is a lens which focuses light which passes through on to a line instead of on to a point, as a spherical lens would. The curved face or faces of a cylindrical lens are sections of a cylinder, and focus the image passing through it onto a line parallel to the intersection of the...
es were patented by Walter Hess in 1912. By replacing the line and space pairs in a simple parallax barrier with tiny cylindrical lenses, Hess avoided the light loss that dimmed images viewed by transmitted light and made prints on paper unacceptably dark. An additional benefit was that the position of the observer was less restricted, as the substitution of lenses was geometrically equivalent to narrowing the spaces in a line-and-space barrier.
Philips solved a significant problem with these displays in the mid-1990s by slanting the cylindrical lenses with respect to the underlying pixel grid. Philips
Philips
Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V. , more commonly known as Philips, is a multinational Dutch electronics company....
produced its WOWvx line, based on this idea, until 2009, running up to a 2160p resolution of 3840×2160 pixel 46 viewing angles. Lenny Lipton
Lenny Lipton
Leonard "Lenny" Lipton is a well known author, filmmaker and stereoscopic vision system inventor.Lipton wrote the lyrics to the song Puff the Magic Dragon as a 19-year-old at Cornell University. He graduated from Cornell University where he majored in physics. The song was a hit in 1963 for Peter...
's company, StereoGraphics, produced displays based on the same idea, citing a much earlier patent for the slanted lenticulars. Magnetic3d and Zero Creative have also been involved. The hardware overlay for iPhone
IPhone
The iPhone is a line of Internet and multimedia-enabled smartphones marketed by Apple Inc. The first iPhone was unveiled by Steve Jobs, then CEO of Apple, on January 9, 2007, and released on June 29, 2007...
and iPod touch
IPod touch
The iPod Touch is a portable media player, personal digital assistant, handheld game console, and Wi-Fi mobile device designed and marketed by Apple Inc. The iPod Touch adds the multi-touch graphical user interface to the iPod line...
named 3DeeSlide also adopts this technology to convert the standard screen into an auto 3D display.
Other
Dimension Technologies released a range of commercially available 2D/3D switchable LCDs in 2002 using a combination of parallax barriers and lenticular lenses. SeeReal TechnologiesSeeReal Technologies
SeeReal Technologies GmbH is a Dresden-based company focusing on the development of 3D display solutions. It is owned by its Luxembourg parent company SeeReal Technologies S.A., which is responsible for marketing, partnering and IP licensing....
has developed a holographic
Holography
Holography is a technique that allows the light scattered from an object to be recorded and later reconstructed so that when an imaging system is placed in the reconstructed beam, an image of the object will be seen even when the object is no longer present...
display based on eye tracking. CubicVue exhibited a color filter pattern autostereoscopic display at the Consumer Electronics Association's i-Stage competition in 2009.
There are a variety of other autostereo systems as well, such as volumetric display
Volumetric display
A volumetric display device is a graphical display device that forms a visual representation of an object in three physical dimensions, as opposed to the planar image of traditional screens that simulate depth through a number of different visual effects...
, in which the reconstructed light field occupies a true volume of space, and integral imaging
Integral imaging
Integral imaging is an autostereoscopic or multiscopic 3D display, meaning that it displays a 3D image without the use of special glasses on the part of the viewer. It achieves this by placing an array of microlenses in front of the image, where each lens looks different depending on viewing angle...
, which uses a fly's-eye lens array.
The term automultiscopic display has recently been introduced as a shorter synonym for the lengthy "multi-view autostereoscopic 3D display".
Sunny Ocean Studios, located in Singapore, has been credited with developing an automultiscopic screen that can display autostereo 3D images from 64 different reference points.
Tridelity AG, located in Germany, has been credited with developing an auto-stereoscopic display in portrait format specially designed for the signage market.
Movement Parallax: Single View vs. Multi-View Systems
Movement parallax refers to the fact that the view of a scene changes with movement of the head. Thus, different images of the scene are seen as the head is moved from left to right, and from up to down.Many autostereoscopic displays are single-view displays and are thus not capable of reproducing the sense of movement parallax, except for a single viewer in systems capable of eye tracking
Eye tracking
Eye tracking is the process of measuring either the point of gaze or the motion of an eye relative to the head. An eye tracker is a device for measuring eye positions and eye movement. Eye trackers are used in research on the visual system, in psychology, in cognitive linguistics and in product...
.
Some autostereoscopic displays, however, are multi-view displays, and are thus capable of providing the perception of left-right movement parallax.
Eight and sixteen views are typical for such displays. While it is theoretically possible to simulate the perception of up-down movement parallax, no current display systems are known to do so, and the up-down effect is widely seen as less important than left-right movement parallax. One consequence of not including parallax about both axes becomes more evident as objects increasingly distant from the plane of the display are presented, for as the viewer moves closer to or farther away from the display such objects will more obviously exhibit the effects of perspective shift about one axis but not the other, appearing variously stretched or squashed to a viewer not positioned at the optimum distance from the display.
See also
- Stereoscopic 3D
- Parallax barrier
- Hologram
- MasterImage 3DMasterImage 3DMasterImage 3D is a company that develops stereoscopic 3D systems for theaters and auto-stereoscopic 3D displays for mobile devices.-Technology:...
- 2D-plus-depth2D-plus-depth2D-plus-Depth or also called 2D +'Z' format is a Stereoscopic Video Coding format that is used for 3D displays, such as Philips WOWvx...
- AutostereogramAutostereogramAn autostereogram is a single-image stereogram , designed to create the visual illusion of a three-dimensional scene from a two-dimensional image in the human brain...
- Computer stereo visionComputer stereo visionComputer stereo vision is the extraction of 3D information from digital images, such as obtained by a CCD camera. By comparing information about a scene from two vantage points, 3D information can be extracted by examination of the relative positions of objects in the two panels...
- LTPSPolycrystalline siliconPolycrystalline silicon, also called polysilicon, is a material consisting of small silicon crystals. It differs from single-crystal silicon, used for electronics and solar cells, and from amorphous silicon, used for thin film devices and solar cells....
- Nintendo 3DSNintendo 3DSThe is a portable game console produced by Nintendo. The autostereoscopic device is able to project stereoscopic 3D effects without the use of 3D glasses or any additional accessories. The Nintendo 3DS features backward compatibility with Nintendo DS series software, including Nintendo DSi software...
- Stereo cameraStereo cameraA stereo camera is a type of camera with two or more lenses with a separate image sensor or film frame for each lens. This allows the camera to simulate human binocular vision, and therefore gives it the ability to capture three-dimensional images, a process known as stereo photography. Stereo...
- StereoscopyStereoscopyStereoscopy refers to a technique for creating or enhancing the illusion of depth in an image by presenting two offset images separately to the left and right eye of the viewer. Both of these 2-D offset images are then combined in the brain to give the perception of 3-D depth...
, the primary means by which people perceive 3D imagery - StereogramStereogramA stereogram is pair of two-dimensional panels depicting the view of a scene or an object from the vantage points of the right and left eyes. Observing the panels superimposed in a stereoscope results in the experience of three-dimensionality by virtue of the fact that object depth is encoded as...
, creating 3D perception on printed paper or ordinary monitors - Volumetric displayVolumetric displayA volumetric display device is a graphical display device that forms a visual representation of an object in three physical dimensions, as opposed to the planar image of traditional screens that simulate depth through a number of different visual effects...
- HTC EVO 3DHTC EVO 3DThe HTC Evo 3D is an Android 2.3 smartphone that allows for the creation and viewing of 3D content through the use of two 5 MP rear-facing cameras and a glasses-free 3D-capable 4.3" qHD touch screen. In the United States, the Evo 3D is available exclusively on the Sprint/Nextel network...
External links
- 3D International
- VisuMotion
- Explanation of 3D Autostereoscopic Monitors
- Overview of different Autostereoscopic LCD displays
- Rendering for an Interactive 360º Light Field Display, a demonstration of Autostereoscopy using a spinning mirror, a holographic diffuser, and a high speed video projector demonstrated at SIGGRAPHSIGGRAPHSIGGRAPH is the name of the annual conference on computer graphics convened by the ACM SIGGRAPH organization. The first SIGGRAPH conference was in 1974. The conference is attended by tens of thousands of computer professionals...
2007 - Behind-the-scenes video about production for autostereoscopic displays