Introduction to Autostereoscopic Displays

General Principle

As per definition, an autostereoscopic 3D impression is based on binocular disparity. The stereopsis is the determining principle, but all other monocular or binocular depth cues can be used to improve the 3D quality.

An autostereoscopic display has to contain at least two elements: A display device to represent the specific image data (screen image) and an optical modulator to separate parts of the screen image(s) into different parts of the viewing area.

A common display device will show the images as raster image, in which each pixel position can be described with two coordinates. The raster image is a combination of certain number of raster images, representing different perspective views. The combination rule for the screen image can be completely specified in a two dimensional matrix (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Screen image matrix

where

• i, j position indices

• i₀ first horizontal index

• i_n last horizontal index

• j₀ first vertical index

• j_m last vertical index

• V perspective view number at position i, j