Optimal Allocation of Quantized Human Eye Depth Perception for Light Field Display Design

TL;DR

This paper develops an optimization framework to determine the optimal quantized depth levels for light field displays, aiming to saturate human depth perception and guide the design of immersive 3D head-mounted displays.

Contribution

It introduces a globally optimal method for selecting depth levels in light field displays based on psychophysical theories, addressing a key gap in display design.

Findings

Approximately 1731 stereoscopic depth levels saturate human perception.

Optimal placement of first three depth levels minimizes monocular error.

Provides guidelines for designing near-eye and light-field displays.

Abstract

Creating immersive 3D stereoscopic, autostereoscopic, and lightfield experiences are becoming the center point of optical design of future head mounted displays and lightfield displays. However, despite the advancement in 3D and light field displays; there is no consensus on what are the necessary quantized depth levels for such emerging displays at stereoscopic or monocular modalities. Here we start from psychophysical theories and work toward defining and prioritizing quantized levels of depth that would saturate the human depth perception. We propose a general optimization framework, which locates the depth levels in a \emph{globally optimal} way for band limited displays. While the original problem is computationally intractable, we manage to find a tractable reformulation as maximally covering a region of interest with a selection of hypographs corresponding to the monocular depth of field profiles. The results show that on average 1731 stereoscopic and 8 monocular depth levels (distributed from 25 cm to infinity) would saturate the visual depth perception. Also the first 3 depth levels should be allocated at (148), then (83, 170), then (53, 90, 170) distances respectively from the face plane to minimize the monocular error in the entire population. The study further discusses the 3D spatial profile of the quantized stereoscopic and monocular depth levels. The study provides fundamental guidelines for designing optimal near eye displays, light-field monitors, and 3D screens.