Displays
Alioscopy’s displays are equipped with an array of lenticular lenses that cast different images onto each eye. Each lens magnifies a different point of view for each eye because it is viewed from slightly different angles. This results in a state of the art visual stereo effect. Alioscopy technology supports both 2D and 3D content in full HD resolution (1920 x 1080p). Standard video can be shown as well as specific 3D content, rendered with typical 3D software such as 3ds Max, Maya, Lightwave, and XSI.
The Alioscopy display uses 8 interleaved images to produce the autostereoscopic 3D effect. The eight images can be created by a variety of methods, but they must represent 8 views of the 3D scene created by the Off-Axis Projection Method. Off-Axis Projection requires the use of asymmetric camera viewing cones as can be seen in the figure below. The left cone is in blue, the right in red.
The 8 cameras are separated from each other by the average distance between the left and right eye. Typically this is taken as 2.24” (5.69 cm):
When combining the views from these eight cameras for display on the Alioscopy screen, a special interleaving routine is utilized. If each camera were to simply be interleaved in sequence for each horizontal line on the screen, the vertical resolution would remain 1080, but the horizontal resolution would be 1/8 of 1920, or 240. Alioscopy’s interleaving routine effectively trades higher resolution along the horizontal direction for lower resolution along the vertical direction. It does this by offsetting the cameras on each horizontal line of the display, and by combining the subpixel colors of each camera image in a special way. To accommodate the offset, the lenticular lens is rotated so that it runs diagonally across the screen rather than vertically. Subsequent lines are each shifted by one camera. The camera contributions look like this:
The normally vertical lenticular lens is rotated so that the first lens’s upper left edge covers camera 1 red from the first row, camera 1 green from the second row and camera 1 blue from the third row.
