360 degree viewable floating autostereoscopic display using integral photography and multiple semitransparent mirrors.

In this paper, we present a polyhedron-shaped floating autostereoscopic display viewable from 360 degrees using integral photography (IP) and multiple semitransparent mirrors. IP combined with polyhedron-shaped multiple semitransparent mirrors is used to achieve a 360 degree viewable floating three-dimensional (3D) autostereoscopic display, having the advantage of being able to be viewed by several observers from various viewpoints simultaneously. IP is adopted to generate a 3D autostereoscopic image with full parallax property. Multiple semitransparent mirrors reflect corresponding IP images, and the reflected IP images are situated around the center of the polyhedron-shaped display device for producing the floating display. The spatial reflected IP images reconstruct a floating autostereoscopic image viewable from 360 degrees. We manufactured two prototypes for producing such displays and performed two sets of experiments to evaluate the feasibility of the method described above. The results of our experiments showed that our approach can achieve a floating autostereoscopic display viewable from surrounding area. Moreover, it is shown the proposed method is feasible to facilitate the continuous viewpoint of a whole 360 degree display without flipping.