Naked Eye 3D perception from conventional 2D displays.

by Ian Overington (20 pages, 2.97MB )

Summary.
During the past few years there has been a major reawakening of interest in creation of imagery which provides perception of 3D depth. A number of methods of providing such perception have been devised, at least three types of twin lens 3D camera have been manufactured, various specialist 3D viewing facilities have been marketed and there has been considerable documentation produced discussing the pros & cons of various approaches.

In contrast to this there seems to have been little attention paid to the exact mechanisms within the human visual tract which lead to the actual perception of 3D. Having developed a wide knowledge of the fine details of early human vision during some 40 years of vision research, I have felt it desirable to attempt to answer this question. As a result of this I believe that I have developed an alternative method of handling input stereo pairs of images (or video streams) which permits substantial perception of 3D from what are essentially resultant 2D images or video streams without need for any form of visual aids. These forms of output imagery retain the full resolution, colour & brightness properties of the original individual input images, whilst also being capable of being presented in virtually any form which is normally available for 2D image presentation!

This report starts with a brief overview of the current general facilities for 3D viewing, together with a summary of some aspects of 3D image capture which are important to appreciate for anyone wishing to use the new generation of 3D cameras. It then discusses the visual knowledge background from which the new naked eye technique has been developed, together with the basics of the technique itself.