Design and Evaluation of a Viewer-Dependent Stereoscopic Display

Traditional stereoscopic displays assume the viewer to be standing at a specific location, that is the same pose (relative to the screen) of the stereo camera pair that depicted the scene (physically or virtually). Even for basic applications, such as movies or games, this leads to visual inconsistencies as soon as the user moves his head. Moreover, with this premises, it is not possible at all to develop more sophisticated 3D applications, involving the freedom for the user to walk around objects or to interact with them. The most popular solution to these limitation is to track the user head in order to produce a scene rendering that can be seen correctly from his point of view. With this paper we propose a viewer-dependent system that is very easy to implement since it is based on a simple augmentation of basic shutter glasses used in standard stereoscopic setups. Furthermore, we introduce a practical and sound method to quantitatively assess the accuracy of any view-dependent display approach. This fills a clear shortcoming of the currently adopted evaluation methods, that are for the most part qualitative.