MOEVision: Simple multiview display with clear floating image - art. no. 64900J

This paper presents a simple and inexpensive multiview 31) display system composed of a LCD panel, a convex lens array, and a Fresnel lens. In the proposed system a pair of the LCD fragment and a convex lens in the array plays the role of a projector. The idea of multiview 3D displays composed of multiple projectors and a large convex lens or a concave mirror is old and famous. The conventional methods, however, require diffusers to show continuous motion parallax, which decays the quality of the image. To solve this problem we use a convex lens array with no gaps between the lenses, which realizes continuous motion parallax without diffusers. The convex lens array, however, has to produce images without aberration to show the viewer stable 31) images. It is hard and expensive to realize such lens arrays without gaps between the component lenses. To produce images with little aberration in a simple format, the author proposes the optical system where each component lens makes the parallel light rays instead of creating an image by keeping the distance between the LCD surface and the lens array the same as the focal distance of the component lenses. To create an image, we use a large convex-type Fresnel lens, which has been used only for the purpose of distributing multiview images to each viewpoint in the conventional multi-projection systems. Fresnel lens, receiving parallel light from the lens array, creates a floating real image at its focal distance and attains distribution of multiview images at the same time. With this configuration we can create images with little aberration even when we use a lens array composed of simple convex-type Fresnel lenses widely available with low prices.