Wedge Optics in Flat Panel Displays

Liquid crystal display (LCD) technology will struggle to display high resolution on screens as big as whiteboards. Yet there is demand also for less power consumption, 3-D images, and that the display should be able to see gestures and feel touch. Most of these features are possible with projection and wedge light guides make projection slim, but picoprojectors are so dim that many will be needed for such a big screen. For now, we use instead a hybrid of technologies: light guides look out from behind an LCD to see where the viewers' hands and eyes are, and a collimated backlight lets us illuminate one view at a time to each eye. This lets us synthesize 3-D with achievable increases in LCD frame rate. We expect that this combination of a multiview 3-D display and a view-dependent rendered image will give us the potential to televise the experience of looking through a window.