Lenticular and Multiview Displays

Looking Glass Displays
Leia/Dimenco
Sony Spatial Reality
RealFiction
Misapplied Sciences
SeeCubic
Multi-lens experiments
Other

This is another wide reaching category that could be classified under a few different names. I previously categorized some of these under lightfield displays, but this category tends to use a different approach.

Looking Glass Factory Displays

Looking Glass Factory

Looking Glass Factory has been a pioneer in lenticular autostereoscopic displays for years and has made a number of innovative products in this category. They have an interesting differentiator in that they offer a range of products from smaller and more affordable consumer models to larger commercial models.

In very basic, but somewhat unaccurate terms, the display itself uses a very high resolution/high pixel density display and a specialized lenticular film that directs the light into a few dozen different viewing angles. A specialized imaging pipeline takes a 3D scene, slices it up into all of these different views, and puts each one on a thin slice on the display. As that light passes through the lenticular film, it gets refracted into the different angles and allows each of your eyes to see a different view. The effect itself is very convincing and really feels like a floating image is right in front of the display. Some products have an additional light frame around them that helps give an extra sensation of depth. The overall viewing angle/viewing cone for the depth effect is aboout 53º. It is also worth noting that they are half parallax displays which means that the depth effect largely only works in the horizontal axis (moving your head side to side) whereas the vertical axis (trying to look above and below an object on screen) doesn't quite produce much of a depth effect. Another way to put this is that you can't buy a landscape display and turn it vertically and expect it to work as intended.

Looking Glass is releasing new products every year, so it can be hard to keep guides like this completely up to date, but I'll try and cover some of their usual offerings below.

They usually have smaller units like their 2024 Looking Glass Go that is a small ~7" portable battery powered display, primarily aimed at consumers. It has the ability to store and display images directly on the device, but can also be run from a PC.

Moving up a wrung in size they also have various types of 16" and 32" Displays that are 8K OLED displays under the hood. Their newest 2024 models have opted for a much slimmer design to look more like a standard monitor.

Their current largest size is their 65" that is quite impressive in person. Video below:

As the displays get larger, they need to pack even more pixels into the display to create the same volumetric visual effect. This increase in density also increases rendering overhead. There is also a bit of a tradeoff for physical size and the sensation of depth - the sense of depth from parallax is slightly less as the display scales up - shallow depth of field content tends to work best. It will be interesting to see where this kind of technology goes as resolution density continues to evolve.

Below is an overview of Looking Glass's previous product that utilzied somewhat similar technology but had a large slab of acrylic on top of the display that felt like a volume that contained the image. The newer version feels like an image you can put your hand through.

Another video link

Leia Lightfield Display

Leia Lightfield Tablet Display

Leia Lightfield Displays are another commercially available product in the form of an android tablet that promises a lightfield experience, but ultimately uses a different optical stack than Looking Glass or other light field displays. They use a specialized diffractive backlight technology that essentially delivers different viewing angles to each eye to create a sense of depth. More on the scientific approach in the video below.

Also more writing on the technology itself here.

Here is a whitepaper on the technology as well.

Leia may be working on an updated display from their tablet as well - a sample video of it is featured here.

Leia also acquired Dimenco in 2023, and they were another autostereoscopic manufacturer with a slightly different approach.

Sony Spatial Reality

Sony has released a couple displays that allow for single user 3D viewing. They have a ~15" model (ELF-SR1) and a larger 27" (ELF-SR2) that allow for glasses free 3D. It achieves this by utilizing a lenticular overlay on top of a 4K screen and then applies facial/eye tracking to send 2 different views to the correct eye. The facial tracking also allows for a sense of full horizontal and vertical parallax because it can move a 3D scene relative to your eyes and essentially expand the viewable area.

I have seen this display in person and it is quite sharp and nice looking when you're in the right position.

RealFiction

Realfiction has a number of technologies and capabilities that allow for a unique approach to multiview displays. According to the video below, they use a very fast ferroelectric liquid crystal element to display time-multiplexed images with no loss in spatial resolution. Maintaining spatial resolution is an important distinction in comparison with other "lossy resolution" lenticular multiview technology on this page. Realfiction achieves this effect (in very simplified terms) by synchronizing the overlay with the display and showing different images per view. They have public demos that show their Directional Pixel Technology working for microLED (shown below) and LCD displays as well as eye tracking capbilities that allow for stereoscopic views.

SeeCubic

SeeCubic is a display company that has a slightly different lenticular and depth approach than some of the others on this page. They offer a range of different displays and optical applications as well as a software tool to convert a range of media to be suitable for depth displays. A lot of their technology seems to be more geared towards integration in other commercial displays that would then be sold to consumers vs directly used from Seecubic themselves. Unfortunately there aren't a ton of videos that feature their content out there just yet, but they have been around for a while.

Misapplied Sciences

This one is a tricky one for me because its somewhat like a light field display mentioned in the following but is treated a bit more like a multiview experience.

The company Misapplied Sciences has developed a concept of a Parallel Reality Display that promises the ability to display different pixels to different viewers (in very simplified terms).

These pixels can simultaneously project up to millions of light rays of different colors and brightness. Each ray can then be software-directed to a specific person.

Here is a link to a long talk from one of the developers of this technology that delves into a bit more detail - the short version is that it uses a dense series of pico projectors, lens elements and FPGA's to beam images to specific locations in space. Below is a demonstration of what 12 different viewpoints could look like to different viewers from a single display.

Misapplied Sciences has launched one large display in an airport terminal that uses tracking technology to beam travel info to specific users.

Multi Lens Display

These are more in the lab experiment realm, but worth mentioning as a curiosity. This experiment from around 2010 by Hideki Kakeya utilizes a display that shows multiple angles of some 3D content and an array of microlenses to provide multiple glasses-free angles of that content. More information here.

A similar experiment from NVIDIA is below: