Generating Volumetric Images For Omnidirectional 3D Displays

Displaying 3D objects in actual 3D space is the goal of modern display technology. This paper focuses on generating volumetric images for two omnidirectional 3D display systems, which are designed and made by our research group in Zhejiang University. One is a swept volumetric 3D color display which employing rotating LED panel. Another one is a 3D color light-field display.Swept volumetric 3D color display fills the cylinder space with voxels by the way of fast rotating the LED panel, and people can acquire 3D images from the instant lightened voxels. Real-time voxelization is the key algorithm of displaying dynamic virtual scenes. In this paper, a two-step GPU-based algorithm is proposed for high performance color voxelization in cylinder space. By the algorithm, firstly the 3D scene is voxelized in a uniform cubic space, and the produced data are stored in several textures. These textures are then re-sampled through many-to-many mapping, producing the uniform color voxels in cylinder space. Furthermore, a strategy of incremental voxelization is described which takes advantage of the spatial-temporal continuity in the dynamic scene. The proposed algorithm runs real-time on GPU, and experimental results on a volumetric 3D display based on rotating LED panel show that the algorithm is promising.The 3D color light-field display system uses a high-speed projector to project a series of images on a rotating double-side anisotropic mirrored surface, then the rays will be reflected to selected directions. Observers can watch autostereoscopic 3D images from 360°around the display device with correct occlusion. In this paper, the algorithms of generating the projecting images are designed respectively for geometric models and for image set of life objects. Experimental results of displaying several 3D color objects are showed.