The interdependence of spatial and angular resolution in the quality of experience of light field visualization

Light field displays provide a natural sense of 3D visual experience through the glasses-free visualization of the content. It is enabled by the smoothness of the horizontal motion parallax, which is determined by the density of source images allocated to a given field of view. This measure is commonly known as angular resolution, and similarly to spatial resolution, has a fundamental effect on the visual experience. In this paper, we investigate how the reduction of angular and spatial resolution affect each other. Our hypothesis is that lowering spatial resolution to a certain extent does not degrade the perception of the parallax effect, in fact, it may improve it. We carried out a series of subjective tests on a real light field display to test this hypothesis, results of which are introduced in this paper.