3D desktop displays for multimedia

Research and development on 3D displays has made great progress and even autostereoscopic 3D displays are on the verge of being put onto the market. The main market within the near future will be, besides entertainment applications, the field of multimedia desktop displays. An autostereoscopic display suitable for communication applications has been developed at the Heinrich-Hertz-Institute. Different demands for a stereoscopic desktop display were fulfilled. Here, a human factors problem concerning spatial reproduction at small displays has to be solved: with common 3D-desktop-displays only a limited volume of depth around the screen surface can be reproduced without causing eye-strain. The reproduction of people and faces at an unnatural small scale leads to the "puppet theatre effect". This prevents the system from achieving a high degree of telepresence in communication applications. The reproduction of the scene in a larger distance behind the screen plane may avoid the effect of miniaturism. In this case the plane of accommodation has to be shifted to achieve comfortable viewing conditions. This shifting of the plane of accommodation can be achieved to a certain degree by means of optical systems. A study is reported in the following, within the framework of which the use of Fresnel lenses and concave mirrors was simulated. Different optical systems were evaluated to find the best method for a realisation.