Near-Eye Light Field Displays

Douglas Lanman demonstrates a light-field-based approach to near-eye displays that enables thinner head-mounted displays with accurate focus and depth cues.

SIGGRAPH 2013 Emerging Technologies research.nvidia.com/publication/near-eye-light-field-display… This light-field-based approach to near-eye display allows for dramatically thinner and lighter head-mounted displays capable of depicting accurate accommodation, convergence, and binocular-disparity depth cues. The near-eye light-field displays depict sharp images from out-of-focus display elements by synthesizing light fields that correspond to virtual scenes located within the viewer's natural accommodation range. Building on concepts shared with existing integral imaging displays and microlens-based light field cameras, we optimize performance in the context of near-eye viewing. Near-eye light-field displays support continuous accommodation of the eye throughout a finite depth of field; as a result, binocular configurations provide a means to address the accommodation-convergence conflict that occurs with existing stereoscopic displays. This demonstration features a binocular prototype and a GPU-accelerated stereoscopic light field renderer.