A novel autostereoscopic display system to provide seamless stereoscopic view changes

Abstract

In this paper a new method for the autostereoscopic display, named the Dual Layer Parallax Barrier (DLPB) method, is introduced to overcome the limitation of the fixed viewing zone. Compared with the conventional parallax barrier methods, the proposed DLPB method uses moving parallax barriers to make the stereoscopic view changed according to the movement of viewer. In addition it provides seamless stereoscopic views without abrupt change of 3D depth feeling at any eye position. We implement a prototype of the DLPB system which consists of a switchable dual-layered Twisted Nematic Liquid Crystal Display (TN-LCD) and a head-tracker. The head tracker employs a video camera for capturing images, and is used to calculate the angle between the eye gazing direction and the projected direction onto the display plane. According to the head-tracker’s control signal, the dual-layered TN-LCD is able to alternate the direction of viewing zone adaptively by a solid-state analog switch. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed autostereoscopic display maintains seamless 3D views even when a viewer’s head is moving. Moreover, its extended use towards mobile devices such as portable multimedia player (PMP), smartphone, and cellular phone is discussed as well.