Towards Occlusion-Aware Multifocal Displays

The human visual system uses numerous cues for depth perception, including disparity, accommodation, motion parallax and occlusion. It is incumbent upon virtual-reality displays to satisfy these cues to provide an immersive user experience. Multifocal displays, one of the classic approaches to satisfy the accommodation cue, place virtual content at multiple focal planes, each at a diff erent depth. However, the content on focal planes close to the eye do not occlude those farther away; this deteriorates the occlusion cue as well as reduces contrast at depth discontinuities due to leakage of the defocus blur. This paper enables occlusion-aware multifocal displays using a novel ConeTilt operator that provides an additional degree of freedom — tilting the light cone emitted at each pixel of the display panel. We show that, for scenes with relatively simple occlusion confi gurations, tilting the light cones provides the same eff ect as physical occlusion. We demonstrate that ConeTilt can be easily implemented by a phase-only spatial light modulator. Using a lab prototype, we show results that demonstrate the presence of occlusion cues and the increased contrast of the display at depth edges.The authors acknowledge support via the NSF CAREER grant CCF1652569, European Research Council Horizon 2020 #635537, ISF 1046-14, Ollendorff Minerva Center of the Technion