Interactive Displays: Natural Human-Interface Technologies

Chapter 11Towards “True” 3D Interactive Displays

Jim Larimer¹, Philip J. Bos² and Achintya K. Bhowmik³

¹ImageMetrics, Half Moon Bay, California

²Kent State University, Kent, Ohio

³Intel Corporation, Santa Clara, California

11.1 Introduction

We use all of our senses to interact with the environment, but there can be no doubt that vision provides the most immediate and important impressions of our surroundings. The signals that generate those experiences are in the light field. The light field is all of the information contained in light as it passes through a finite volume in space as we look in any direction from a vantage point within this small finite volume.

Displays today can reconstruct 2D and stereo-pair 3D (s3D) imagery, but there are visual signals in the natural environment that humans sense and use that are missing when images are reconstructed on these displays. This gap between a human's ability to extract information from the light field, and a similar ability to capture and reconstruct these signals, is being closed as improvements to cameras and displays replace current technologies used in computing and video entertainment systems. The missing signals are the subject of this section.

If you try to focus on an object that is out of focus in an image presented on a modern display, you will not be able to bring it into focus. This outcome can be irritating and uncomfortable. The information needed to bring the object into focus is absent in the signal as reconstructed ...