
Avegant “Light Field” Display - _pius
http://www.kguttag.com/2017/03/09/avegant-light-field-display-magic-leap/
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ChuckMcM
Fun. I hope they are successful. One of the things that my daughter pointed
out about 3D movies is that because they are 3D your brain thinks it should be
able to shift the focus but it can't and that 'fight' gets in the way of
enjoying the content. My understanding is that light field optics don't have
this issue.

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jboggan
3D movies are a misnomer, they're actually forced perspective.

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taneq
Forced perspective refers to optical illusions relying on a particular
viewpoint. '3D movies' are stereo pairs.

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glibgil
We're going to need a new word for resolution at depth. Cubic resolution?

"Cubic resolution of 1080p by 32p"

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mojomark
>We're going to need a new word for resolution at depth.

Well then I have good news for you - we already have a metric for resolution
irrespective of the depth at which an object is rendered, and we've had it for
years. That metric is Pixels Per Degree (PPD). PPD complements the way the eye
resolves images (visual acuity) and is independent of depth. ~62 PPD is
generally the maximum resolution of the human eye - although
motion/shapes/contrast/color can alter (increase or decrease) this threshold.

PPD takes into account FOV, binocular overlap, and rederable pictures - all in
one clean metric.

The truth of the matter is that when companies use this standard unit such
that all AR/VR display resolutions can be compared on an level playing field,
that tends to lift the veil that is obfuscating how poor the actual imaging
resolutions truly are.

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mojomark
In case anyone is interested - NVIDIA on PPD:
[http://phrogz.net/tmp/ScreenDens2In.html#find:density,pxW:19...](http://phrogz.net/tmp/ScreenDens2In.html#find:density,pxW:1920,pxH:720,size:12.3,sizeUnit:in,axis:diag,distance:31,distUnit:in)

They claify that while acuity limits for a person with 20/20 vision is 60PPD,
the average acuity is more like 20/15, equating to 80PPD. It looks like NVIDIA
put the PPD benchmark for an ideal display at ~92PPD, which would push the
acuity limits for just about every human user. That seems reasonable to me.

As a point of reference, accounting for binocular overlap values (which I had
to hunt for), I calculated PPD's for two of the highest pixel-count HMD's out
there:

StarVR: 18.6 PPD Sensics dSight: 20.2 PPD

I don't have the details needed to calculate Avagent or Hololens PPD's, but
I'd venture to say their at this point or lower. So, as you can see, we still
have a long way to go.

One more note - Displays don't need a constant PPD accros the entire rendered
image, thanks to steep visual acuity drop-off relative to FOV angle (1). So,
to the OP's credit, perhaps there is still some work that is needed on the PPD
metric to account for HMD's that use foveated imaging (2), such that all
displays (foveated & non-foveated) can still be compared side-by-side.

1\.
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/27/Ac...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/27/AcuityHumanEye.svg/500px-
AcuityHumanEye.svg.png) 2\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foveated_imaging](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foveated_imaging)

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nom
Hmmmm, just some brainstorming here:

You should be able to convert your smartphone's HD display into a low-
resolution light field display by attaching a special lens array. It's like
the lenticular 3D displays (they refract two rows of pixels in two different
directions to create a stereo image), just omnidirectional.

I'm not sure how complex the manufacturing and calibration is but in theory we
could create an attachable lens array for smartphones and use it to display a
low-res light field, couldn't we?

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randyrand
yes. and people have. you're right that its very low res!

The newest idea is to use "programmable" difractive optics instead of
lenticular lenses.

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zodiac
Do you have some links? Curious to try it out myself

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drazvan
[http://www.leia3d.com](http://www.leia3d.com) for instance. I have one of
their early dev kit displays and it's quite impressive (but very small).

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mozumder
This is a horrible misuse of the term "light-field" for a display.

An actual light-field display would have, for every pixel, maybe 16 sub-
pixels, each only visible from a certain vantage point. They represent the
rays that travel through each point in space.

This is something that could bring true glass-less 3-D, and would be an ideal
VR holographic display if they could make a 16K display that could fit in a
headset. You wouldn't even need lenses to focus - just stick the display right
up to your face.

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colordrops
Isn't that what they are offering though? How else would you be able to focus
at different lengths?

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josephpmay
This display is really an accommodating display, not a lightfield display.
Although it's simulating a lightfield, it's not technically producing one.

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nickparker
A publicity video can be found here:

[https://vimeo.com/207586226](https://vimeo.com/207586226)

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m3kw9
Isn't this how magic leap got started? Low valuation at first then bigger and
bigger..

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aethr
Google cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:k1NGo0q...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:k1NGo0qpydYJ:www.kguttag.com/2017/03/09/avegant-
light-field-display-magic-leap/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=au)

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jordache
go blue!

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DiabloD3
I dunno, build one of those for $200, I'd consider buying it. Latency is far
more important than resolution.

