Flexibly Connectable Light Field System for Free View Exploration

Conventional captured-image-based virtual reality (VR) systems have three degrees of freedom (DoFs), where only rotational user motion is tracked for view rendering. This is a major cause of the reduced sense of reality. To increase user immersion levels akin to the real world, 3-DoF+ VR systems that support not only rotational but also translational view changes have been proposed. The light-field (LF) approach is suitable for this type of 3-DoF+ VR because it renders a view from a free view position by simply combining lights. Many previous systems have limited scalability because they assume a single LF for the acquisition and representation of light. One recent work connects multiple LFs at a physical intersection to increase the scalability. However, these fixed connection points limit the renderable view range and the layout of multiple LFs. Furthermore, in conventional single- or multiple-LF systems, the representable ranges of the view positions are highly dependent on the input field-of-view (FOV) of the camera used. In order to realize a wide view exploration range, the above-mentioned limitations must be overcome. This paper proposes a flexible connection scheme for multiple-LF systems taking advantage of the constant radiance of rays in LF theory. The proposed flexibly connectable LF system is able to widen the range of the renderable view position under reasonable conditions of the camera FOV. A light-field unit (LFU) which uses the proposed flexible connection is implemented. The LFU has a square-shaped structure and is thus easily stackable. This offers the advantage of dramatically expanding the scope of view explorations. The proposed LFU achieves 3-DoF+ VR with good quality as well as high scalability. Its cost-performance outcome is also better compared to those in previous works.