Series Preface

Professor Lueder wrote his first book “Liquid Crystal Displays” for the Wiley-SID Series in Display Technology in the year 2000. That book went on to become the best seller in the entire series and is now in its second edition. I am therefore delighted to be writing a foreword to Ernst Lueder's newest work, this time on the topical subject of 3D Displays.

Most sighted human beings have a perception of what 3D means. We are familiar with what we see around us, that we perceive some objects to be nearer than others, that distant objects traversing our field of view appear to move more slowly than and are obscured by those nearer to us, and so on. A smaller but growing fraction of the population is familiar with 3D movies and television. However, a majority will have only a vague understanding of how our brains operate on visual stimuli to create our familiar three-dimensional view of the world. When it comes to creating 3D images on displays, further levels of complexity are required not only to avoid eye strain by displaying inconsistent or misleading visual cues, but to process prodigiously large quantities of data at sufficient speeds to enable real-time 3D visualisation.

This book sets out to present its subject in a manner which places it on a sound mathematical basis. After an overview of the physiology of 3D perception, there follow detailed descriptions of stereoscopic and autostereoscopic displays which are, after all, the most developed of 3D display technologies. Much attention is given to the synthesis of 3D from 2D content, a most important topic, given the quantity of 2D content already available. Quality issues are addressed next, with particular emphasis on methods to improve the visual quality of 3D imagery and to reduce the bandwidth required to transmit it, with special emphasis on a method known as depth image-based rendering. The book then describes three types of displays (integral imaging, holography and volumetric displays) which, although less developed than stereoscopic and autostereoscopic displays, are able to present real three-dimensional images in which the view changes - with nearer objects obscuring more distant ones - as the viewer changes position. This is in contrast to providing a mere illusion of three-dimensionality, as is the case with many stereoscopic images.

The book concludes with a chapter aptly named “A Shot at the Assessment of 3D Technologies” This is not so much a guess at what is coming next, but rather a logical in futuro extension of the technologies and methods already described and, to my reading, a credible one.

This is a complete book, full of the necessary equations, with many illustrations and replete with references. The subject matter, whilst complex, is very clearly presented and will provide readers with a sound technical basis from which to develop their skills further into the exciting field of three-dimensional display science.

Anthony Lowe
Braishfield, UK, 2011