Autostereoscopic Display Using Mirror Array and Single Projector

Autostereoscopic display has been an important research topic for over a century. It providesbinocular and motion parallax for multiple simultaneous viewers, allowing them to observe 3Dimagery without the need for special glasses. Several convincing systems proposed in the pastdecade have demonstrated that projector arrays are well suited to autostereoscopic displays.However, this approach requires numerous, densely packed projectors to project light frommany different directions. These systems are difficult to implement due to high system costs,complicated set-up and laborious calibration. No one to date has proposed how to reduce thenumber of projectors while maintaining high angular resolution for projector array displays.Without such methodologies, we cannot widely disseminate and implement projector-basedautostereoscopic displays in practical applications and fail to bring their potential impact tohuman in a greater extent.On the other hand, the continuous growth of pixel counts and price reduction of high-resolutionvideo projectors offer a great opportunity for achieving autostereoscopy by dividing the pixelsof a single projector into multiviews. Mirrors suggest a simple and effective way to accomplishthe task. In addition, using mirrors can easily reproduce densely arranged virtual projectorsregardless of the physical size of the real projector, thus producing a display of high angularresolution that is unachievable by existing projector arrays. The key challenge is how toproperly design such a mirror apparatus that can accurately redirect light from the projectorwhile maintaining the angular divergence of different pixels to various views. We need todevelop methodologies to understand precisely how different geometrical parameters affecteach other and display performance, and how to optimize these parameters under realisticconstraints.To remedy this gap, the proposed research will a) produce such methodologies and geometricmodels, b) implement the mirror-array-based autostereoscopic displays with variousconfigurations, and c) experimentally verify and evaluate our technique. In our proposedsolution, mirrors will be placed at a tangent to an ellipsoid of revolution that has the projectorand the center of the screen located at its two focal points respectively. We will developsoftware tools to automatically generate optimized models for constructing mirror arrays bydigital fabrication.We believe this study will turn the attention of researchers in autostereoscopic display towardscatadioptric approach, which is promising but remains largely unexplored. The study hasimmense potential to be extended to other applications, such as spatial augmented reality, real-timelight field transmission and telepresence, and make valuable contributions to the realms of3D display, human computer interaction and media arts.