Master's Thesis: View-Sequential Displays
Student Researchers:
Oliver Cossairt (MIT)
Christian Moller (CUED)
Project Supervisors:
Dr. Steven A. Benton (MIT)
Dr. Adrian Travis (CUED)
The MIT-Cambridge View-Sequential 3D Display is a collaboration between Cambridge University Electrical Engineering Department (CUED) and MIT Media Lab's Spatial Imaging Group.
CUED is involved in several areas of research into 3D displays. Several view-sequential displays have been built at CUED in the past with CRTs and custom built FLCD technology.
View-sequential 3D displays allow a different image to be observed depending on viewing position. Unlike lenticular and parallax barrier displays, view-sequential displays utilize a time-multiplexing principle and do not sacrifice resolution (Space-Bandwidth Product) to achieve a 3D effect. View-sequential display optics require long optical paths, so it is difficult to build compact systems with this technique.
A new View-Sequential Display was recently built at MIT that used Texas Instrument DMD™s for the projection engine. The display is capable of producing 16 views at 15bit color with a refresh rate of 50Hz. The display has a viewing zone of 15degrees. The Cambridge-MIT project has successfully demonstrated that view-sequential displays can easily be adapted to integrate new advances in SLM technology.
MIT Media Lab, Spatial Imaging Group
Movies
Optics
View-Sequential display optics consist of a pixel generating device, an objective (projection) lens, an active shutter, and a field lens. For the Cambridge-MIT display, a 3-chip DMD projector is used to generate images and an custom designed FLCD for the shutter. The FLCD and DMD are closely synchronized so that a one 15-bit color image is displayed while a single shutter element is open on the FLCD. A sequence of 16 images/shutter pairs are updated in 1/50th of a second.
Photos
View-Sequential display optics consist of a pixel generating device, an objective (projection) lens, an active shutter, and a field lens. For the Cambridge-MIT display, a 3-chip DMD projector is used to generate images and an custom designed FLCD for the shutter. The FLCD and DMD are closely synchronized so that a one 15-bit color image is displayed while a single shutter element is open on the FLCD. A sequence of 16 images/shutter pairs are updated in 1/50th of a second.
The 3D Studio Max Demo Plane
An Image Rendered from a 3D model captured by a camera system developed by Simon Greenwald
Segmented Brain Imagery Courtesy of Michael Halle at Brigham and Women’s Hospital
A 3D Model of Yoda
A 3D Model of a drumset
The following two movies were taken from views that were rendered with much greater parallax than the display offers. This was done to document the dramatic effect of the display. In practice, this should be avoided as it causes image distortions to objects viewed on the display. There is flicker in the movies because they were captured at 30 Hz instead of at the 50Hz which the display refreshes each view.