Metameric Varifocal Holography

Abstract

Computer-Generated Holography (CGH) offers the potential for genuine, high-quality three-dimensional visuals. However, fulfilling this potential remains a practical challenge due to computational complexity and visual quality issues. We propose a new CGH method that exploits gaze-contingency and perceptual graphics to accelerate the development of practical holographic display systems. Firstly, our method infers the user's focal depth and generates images only at their focus plane without using any moving parts. Second, the images displayed are metamers; in the user's peripheral vision, they need only be statistically correct and blend with the fovea seamlessly. Unlike previous methods, our method prioritises and improves foveal visual quality without causing perceptually visible distortions at the periphery. To enable our method, we introduce a novel metameric loss function that robustly compares the statistics of two given images for a known gaze location. In parallel, we implement a model representing the relation between holograms and their image reconstructions. We couple our differentiable loss function and model to metameric varifocal holograms using a stochastic gradient descent solver. We evaluate our method with an actual proof-of-concept holographic display, and we show that our CGH method leads to practical and perceptually three-dimensional image reconstructions.

Citation Style:    Display Alpha ACM SIGGRAPH IEEEtran Publication

Metameric Varifocal Holography. David R Walton, Koray Kavaklı, Rafael Kuffner dos Anjos, David Swapp, Tim Weyrich, Hakan Urey, Anthony Steed, Tobias Ritschel, Kaan Akşit. IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR), March 2022.David R Walton, Koray Kavaklı, Rafael Kuffner dos Anjos, David Swapp, Tim Weyrich, Hakan Urey, Anthony Steed, Tobias Ritschel, and Kaan Akşit. Metameric varifocal holography. In IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR). IEEE, March 2022.Walton, D. R., Kavaklı, K., dos Anjos, R. K., Swapp, D., Weyrich, T., Urey, H., Steed, A., Ritschel, T., and Akşit, K. 2022. Metameric varifocal holography. In IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR), IEEE.D. R. Walton, K. Kavaklı, R. K. dos Anjos, D. Swapp, T. Weyrich, H. Urey, A. Steed, T. Ritschel, and K. Akşit, “Metameric varifocal holography,” inIEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR). IEEE, Mar. 2022. PDF (18 MB) Low-res PDF (2.1 MB) BibTeX

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the reviewers for their useful feedback. The authors also thank Duygu Ceylan for the fruitful and inspiring discussions improving the outcome of this research, and Selim Ölçer for helping with the fibre alignment of laser light source in the proof-of-concept display prototype. This work was partially funded by the EPSRC/UKRI project EP/T01346X/1 and Royal Society’s RGS\R2\212229 - Research Grants 2021 Round 2.