The effect of angular resolution and 3D rendering on the perceived quality of the industrial use cases of light field visualization

Light field displays enable glasses-free 3D visualization without major constraints regarding the number of simultaneous viewers. There are numerous potential future use case contexts for such devices. Industrial contexts include prototype review and other types of modeling use cases, where the visualized content may vary a lot in terms of complexity and dimensions. However, the perception of 3D models with higher structural fidelity may be severely affected by the ray density of visualization. Furthermore, as the visualized content is always the sharpest in the plane of the screen of the light field display, rendering with greater depth may already result in blurred regions even if the angular resolution is high. In this paper, the effect of angular resolution and 3D rendering on the perceived quality of the industrial use cases of light field visualization is explored via a subjective study. The structurally-diverse source contents are rendered with different depth values, and the resulting test stimuli are created in seven extents of angular resolution, ranging between 0.5 degrees and 2 degrees. The obtained results not only exhibit the combined effect of the investigated features, but also highlight methodological considerations.