Modulating method of linear and circular polarized illuminations for field-lens 3D display

This paper describes the field-lens display for viewing the 2-views stereoscopic images. Conventional 3D movie systems with the special glasses such as polarized glasses provide us touchable spatial images. However, these 3D imaging systems require the observer to wear the glasses. Our research group would like to realize the glasses-less 3D imaging system to construct an interactive spatial imaging environment. The authors have researched the 3D displays and applications. We have ever proposed 3D displays using the slit as a parallax barrier, the lenticular screen and the holographic optical elements(HOEs) for displaying active image^1,2,3. We have developed field-lens 3D displays using dual LCD panels for displaying full-screen left and right images. This system consists of the user's position detection system and the spatial imaging system. Our proposed method can ever modulate horizontally and vertically oriented linear polarized illuminations. However, each LCD panel can't display a left or right image directly. To solve this problem, this paper proposes new modulation method using both linear and circular polarizations.