Multi-planar plenoptic displays

Multi‐planar plenoptic displays consist of multiple spatially varying light‐emitting and light‐modulating planes. In this work, we introduce a framework to display light field data on this new type of display device. First, we present a mathematical notation that describes each of the layers in terms of the corresponding light transport operators. Next, we explain an algorithm that renders a light field with depth into a given multi‐planar plenoptic display and analyze the approximation error. We show two different physical prototypes that we have designed and built: The first design uses a dynamic parallax barrier and a number of bi‐state (translucent/opaque) screens. The second design uses a beam splitter to co‐locate two pairs of parallax barriers and static image projection screens. We evaluate both designs on a number of different 3D scenes. Finally, we present simulated and real results for different display configurations.