Towards 6D Displays

Holograms and 4D displays respond to changes in viewpoint. But the 6D displays respond to changes in viewpoint as well as surrounding light. We encode the 6D reflectance field into an ordinary 2D film. The passive 2D film is inserted between layers of lenticulars to create a 6D photoframe. Our goal is to create realistic pictureframes that not only have a full three-dimensional appearance, but also respond to their environment, producing natural shadows and highlights depending on the direction and intensity of the illumination around them. Note, this is a passive display. No electronics or power is required. In the future, we maybe able to replace the film with an LCD to create 6D video displays.

Traditional flat screen displays (bottom left) present 2D images. 3D and 4D displays have been proposed making use of lenslet arrays to shape a fixed outgoing light field for horizontal or bidirectional parallax (top left). In this article, we present different designs of multi-dimensional displays which passively react to the light of the environment behind. The prototypes physically implement a reflectance field and generate different light fields depending on the incident illumination, for example light falling through a window.