Integral Photography Using Electronic Paper

Abstract

Electronic paper has many advantages. First, no power is needed to maintain static images. Second, no backlighting is necessary, and it can be viewed even in direct sunlight. However, the primary benefit is that it is as legible as real paper because the characters and the figures can be clearly displayed at high resolution. These features indicate the potential of electronic paper as an ideal device if it is applied to 3D displays. Integral photography is one of the best of the various methods of 3D display because not only horizontal but also vertical parallax are obtained without having to wear special glasses. Researchers previously believed that a very expensive fly's eye lens had to be custom designed based on the size of the pixels on the display. However, the extended fractional view (EFV) method, proposed by one of the authors, changed this situation. This method has enabled us to combine a wide range of display devices and several fly's eye lenses on the market with almost no restrictions because the ratio between the lens pitch and dot pitch is no longer restricted to integer numbers. We describe a new 3D display system using electronic paper in which an existing fly's eye lens was placed on the electronic paper of an electronic book (Sony PRS505), and elemental images synthesized with the EFV method were displayed. Our experiments revealed that excellent binocular vision was possible.