A novel stereoscopic display technique with improved spatial and temporal properties

Common stereoscopic 3D (S3D) displays utilize either spatial or temporal interlacing to send different images to each eye. Temporal interlacing sends content to the left and right eyes alternatingly in time, and is prone to artifacts such as flicker, unsmooth motion, and depth distortion. Spatial interlacing sends even pixel rows to one eye and odd rows to the other eye, and has a lower effective spatial resolution than temporal interlacing unless the viewing distance is large. We propose a spatiotemporal hybrid protocol that interlaces the left-and right-eye views spatially, but the rows corresponding to each eye alternate every frame. We performed psychophysical experiments to compare this novel stereoscopic display protocol to existing methods in terms of spatial and temporal properties. Using a haploscope to simulate the three protocols, we determined perceptual thresholds for flicker, motion artifacts, and depth distortion, and we measured the effective spatial resolution. Spatial resolution is improved, flicker and motion artifacts are reduced, and depth distortion is eliminated. These results suggest that the hybrid protocol maintains the benefits of spatial and temporal interlacing while eliminating the artifacts, thus creating a more realistic viewing experience.