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Steoreoscopic displays: Introduction

2023-02-10

It's always great to be finished before a deadline, I am this time around , so here we go a bit earlier than promised:

Vision accounts for around 70 percent of our total sensory perception and can therefore easily be described as the dominant human sensory organ 1 . At the same time, the digital displays that are increasingly omnipresent in the course of digitization completely disregard a component of vision that could not be more essential in everyday life - the stereoscopic perception for obtaining depth and motion information. So-called stereoscopic displays, which are often erroneously referred to as 3D displays, attempt to bridge the gap between conventional two-dimensional display methods and our natural perception of the environment in order to achieve a significantly increased immersion of the viewer in the content shown.

They are particularly suitable for recordings of the real world as well as films that no longer appear merely as a window to distant places and fantasy worlds, but whose sceneries, figuratively speaking, emerge from the screen or projection. However, there are also numerous areas of application in business, science and medicine, for example in the design of products using CAD software, in the cost-effective training of specialist personnel using immersive simulations or in the execution of surgical interventions by remote-controlled robots - in other words, wherever work is carried out with originally three-dimensional data 2 . They are rather unsuitable for the depiction of mere text and simple representations, which are clearly of synthetic nature and do not inherently possess three-dimensionality.

However, the basic principle of showing slightly different images to the left and right eyes according to their different positions in the skull to generate an impression of depth is by no means a recently developed technique. The origins of stereoscopy, in the form of photographs and other stationary graphics, go back to the discovery of this phenomenon and its naming by Charles Wheatstone in 1838 3 / 4 / 5 .

The decisive quality criterion of any stereoscopic technology is the so-called channel separation between the left and right eye, i. e. the clean separation of the two slightly different partial images so as not to cause confusion or headaches for the viewer 3 / 4 / 6 / 7 .

Until today, there are numerous more or less successful technologies, but in this paper the focus will be on the historical anaglyph process, the failed shutter process and the popular polarization filter process as well as existing possibilities of glasses-free implementation via autostereoscopy. Artistic-creative aspects as well as market-economical aspects are not treated in considerable depth.

Before turning to the implementation of stereoscopic methods, the human visual apparatus should first be fundamentally understood. This will be explained in the following article.

Sources

Text

  1. Grasnick, Armin: Grundlagen der virtuellen Realität. Von der Entdeckung der Perspektive bis zur VR-Brille, Berlin 2020, p. 306 – 308.
  2. Dörner, Ralf, Broll, Wolfgang, Jung, Bernhard, Grimm, Paul, and Göbel, Martin: Einführung in Virtual und Augmented Reality, in: Dörner, Ralf, Broll, Wolfgang, Grimm, Paul, and Jung, Bernhard: Virtual und Augmented Reality (VR/AR). Grundlagen und Methoden der Virtuellen und Augmentierten Realität, 2. edition, Berlin 2019, p. 9 – 12.
  3. Grasnick, Armin: 3D ohne 3D-Brille. Handbuch der Autostereoskopie, Berlin 2016, p. 53 – 55.
  4. Grasnick, Armin: Grundlagen der virtuellen Realität. Von der Entdeckung der Perspektive bis zur VR-Brille, Berlin 2020, p. 231 – 239.
  5. Tauer, Holger: Stereo 3D. Grundlagen, Technik und Bildgestaltung, Berlin 2010, p. 148 – 184.
  6. Grasnick, Armin: 3D ohne 3D-Brille. Handbuch der Autostereoskopie, Berlin 2016, p. 79 – 81.
  7. Tauer, Holger: Stereo 3D. Grundlagen, Technik und Bildgestaltung, Berlin 2010, p. 96 – 115.

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