A Study on the Impact of Visualization Techniques on Light Field Perception

Light Field imaging is a promising technology that allows to capture the whole set of light rays in a scene thus enabling the generation of perspective views from any position. This possibility can be exploited in several application scenarios, such as virtual and augmented reality or depth estimation. In this framework many issues arise due different aspects such as the large amount of generated data or to the need of dedicated and expensive hardware for Light Field capturing. Moreover, the Light Field carries information about the entire scene and the data that is delivered to the users largely differs from the traditional 2D and 3D media in terms of content and way of fruition. Dedicated rendering technology and devices for the Light Field are nowadays still not mature or quite expensive and the best option is to render the Light Field data on a conventional 2D screen. Consequently, there is the need for finding the best visualization technique that allows to exploit the information in the Light Field while being accepted by the viewers. In this paper we address this issue by considering six visualization options and by running experimental tests to study which is the technique preferred by the users.