Cylindrical Real-time 3-D Display with Scanned 1-D Light Array

Abstract

The multi-view stereoscopic display has several merits such as requiring no special glasses and providing motion parallax. Since existing displays have flat screens, observers can not watch images from behind. If a multi-view stereoscopic display which has a cylindrical screen is developed, it would enable observers to watch the stereoscopic image like a multiplex hologram from all the horizontal directions around it. But it is difficult to make a cylindrical multi-view stereoscopic display with conventional technology such as a lenticular sheet and two-dimensional spatial light modulators such as LCD or CRT. Therefore we propose a new type of three-dimensional display, which has a cylindrical parallax barrier and a one-dimensional light array which consists of semiconductor light sources in a vertical line. The light array rotates along the cylindrical parallax barrier and its intensity is modulated synchronously. We have developed an experimental display and we confirmed that we can watch different images from all the directions surrounding.