A Three-Dimensional Swept Volume Display Based on LED Arrays

Stereoscopic, or multi-view, display systems are considered as better alternatives to conventional two-dimensional (2D) displays, since such systems can provide important visual cues for the human brain to process three-dimensional (3D) objects. An auto-stereoscopic display is a device that can render 3D images for viewers without the aid of special headgear or glasses. In this paper, we present a new design of an auto-stereoscopic swept-volume display (SVD) system based on light-emitting diode (LED) arrays. This system is constituted of a display device and a graphics control sub-system. The display device is a 2D rotating panel of LEDs, relying on "persistence of vision" to generate 3D images. The graphics control sub-system is composed of a combination of PC software, field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), and supporting circuitry. The primary task of the graphics control sub-system is to process 3D data and control each LED. In addition, a new 3D image generation and rendering method was developed to reduce the bandwidth requirement and to facilitate 3D image display. Demonstrated in the experiments, a prototype of this system is capable of displaying 3D images and videos with full 360 degrees view angles.