A light field display shows a scene from several viewing angles at the same time. Some game consoles already use this principle to display two images – one for each eye – with slightly different perspectives, thus creating a 3D image entirely without 3D glasses. At Fraunhofer IOSB we go even further and create fully adjustable light fields for applications in which the image varies depending on the position of the observer. These can be used, for example, to simulate 3D structures behind the monitor level or to generate light sources that illuminate individual areas differently.
A light field emitter is a plane light source in which both the position and the direction of the light emission can be varied. Our prototype combines a monitor with a lens field, which is located in front of the monitor at the distance of the focal length of the individual lenses. If a pixel behind one of the lenses is activated, the light field display emits a parallel bundle of rays whose direction of propagation is defined by the spatial position of the activated pixel behind the individual lens. In this way a 4D light field is created. The spatial resolution corresponds to the number of individual lenses in the lens field; the angular resolution is determined by the number of monitor pixels behind each individual lens.
In order to be able to control the light field, it must be known which monitor pixel is responsible for the emission of light in a certain direction. The assignment of each monitor pixel to a spatial pixel (single lens) and a direction pixel (viewing angle) is carried out by means of a calibration routine.
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