Towards Occlusion-Aware Multifocal Displays
This addresses an incremental improvement for virtual reality displays by enhancing depth perception cues, specifically targeting occlusion issues in multifocal systems.
The paper tackled the problem of missing occlusion cues in multifocal displays, which reduces contrast at depth edges, by introducing a ConeTilt operator that tilts light cones to simulate physical occlusion, resulting in demonstrated presence of occlusion cues and increased contrast at depth edges.
The human visual system uses numerous cues for depth perception, including disparity, accommodation, motion parallax and occlusion. It is incumbent upon virtual-reality displays to satisfy these cues to provide an immersive user experience. Multifocal displays, one of the classic approaches to satisfy the accommodation cue, place virtual content at multiple focal planes, each at a di erent depth. However, the content on focal planes close to the eye do not occlude those farther away; this deteriorates the occlusion cue as well as reduces contrast at depth discontinuities due to leakage of the defocus blur. This paper enables occlusion-aware multifocal displays using a novel ConeTilt operator that provides an additional degree of freedom -- tilting the light cone emitted at each pixel of the display panel. We show that, for scenes with relatively simple occlusion con gurations, tilting the light cones provides the same e ect as physical occlusion. We demonstrate that ConeTilt can be easily implemented by a phase-only spatial light modulator. Using a lab prototype, we show results that demonstrate the presence of occlusion cues and the increased contrast of the display at depth edges.