HiddenGazeStereo: Hiding Gaze-Contingent Disparity Remapping for 2D-Compatible Natural 3D Viewing

Stereoscopic 3D displays (S3D), the most popular consumer display devices for 3D presentation, have a few problems that degrade the natural visual experience, such as unnatural relationships between eye vergence and accommodation, and severe image blurring (ghost) for viewers without stereo glasses. To simultaneously solve these problems, we combine gaze-contingent disparity remapping with Hidden Stereo in a manner that mutually compensates for their respective shortcomings. Gaze-contingent disparity remapping can reduce the vergence-accommodation conflict by shifting the disparity distribution around the gaze position to be centered on the display plane. Hidden Stereo can synthesize 2D-compatible 3D stereo images that do not produce any ghosting artifacts when the images for the two eyes are linearly fused. Thus, by using our new gaze-contingent display, while one viewer with glasses enjoys natural 3D content, many other glassless viewers enjoy clear 2D content. To enable real-time synthesis, we accelerate Hidden Stereo conversion by limiting the processing to each horizontal scanline. Through a user study using a variety of 3D scenes, we demonstrate that Hidden Stereo can effectively hide disparity information to glassless viewers despite the dynamic disparity manipulations. Moreover, we show that our method can alleviate the limitation of Hidden Stereo—the narrow reproducible disparity range—by manipulating the disparity so that the depth information around the gaze position is maximally preserved.