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UBC Theses and Dissertations

A new spatio-angular light-field display for improving wellbeing in windowless spaces Atkins, Robin

Abstract

This project was motivated by the desire to improve windowless indoor environments by providing an enhanced sense of space to the occupants. Photographs of distant landscapes help surprisingly little. The approach taken for this project was to establish the requirements of a display system capable of providing a convincing sense of depth, while being sufficiently affordable for widespread use. A significant breakthrough in this project was the discovery that high resolution is neither practical nor necessary to do this. This led to the invention of a novel intermediate-resolution display capable of being manufactured using modern manufacturing technology. The research to validate the design followed two separate, synergistic paths: One was a psychophysical study to verify that human perception can accurately determine depth from somewhat blurry scenes. The study confirmed that this was indeed the case, finding that an angular diffusion, or point spread function, of 2.2 degrees can produce scenes with as many as 31 individual depth planes. The other path involved the invention of a novel display system capable of producing intermediate-resolution light fields. Optical simulations indicate that the design can produce images with the desired horizontal and vertical angular diffusion (about 3.4 degrees). In combination, these two results have established the feasibility of an affordable intermediate-resolution display system that could produce an experience indistinguishable from viewing a distant scene through a partially diffusing window.

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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International