New Standards for Immersive Storytelling through Light Field Displays

Evolving UHDTV display technologies provide a welcome improvement over previous cinema and television images, including higher resolution, improved dynamic range and more vivid colors. But they remain fundamentally similar to the past methods: a flat image in a rectangular frame is used to convey the visual art of storytelling. New technologies are now enabling an altogether more immersive and captivating entertainment experience. Next-generation light field displays hold the promise of even more immersive images, with life-like representation of 3D space, accurate parallax and multiple focal points — all without need for glasses or headgear. In order to benchmark future needs, it is important to understand the many parameters of image reproduction that create the illusion of an immersive image. Based on these parameters, the technical requirements for light field image system — including data volume and transmission bandwidth — can be estimated. It is perhaps no surprise that the storage and transmission of light field data far exceeds available capacity in today's infrastructure. Among the potential solutions is the use of a new method of encoding image data, leveraging vectorized representations rather than traditional image rasters.

Published

2018-10

Content type

Original Research

Keywords

Light Field, Plenoptic, VR, 360-video, standards, Virtual Reality, Raster, Vectorized, 6DoF

DOI

10.5594/M001811

ISBN

978-1-61482-960-7