Special printing technology that uses binocular parallax and enables viewers to perceive depth is increasing in popularity. In these systems, a high-resolution printout is overlapped by a special optical component, such as a lenticular board or a fly's eye lens. However, determining the best parameters for the optical components, such as the lens pitch and focal length, is not easy. A lot of trial and error is usually needed to make a prototype, which is expensive and time consuming. Moreover, an independent evaluation of the image quality of a 3D display system is difficult because it is hard to remove the influence from the image input system. A new solution to these problems is proposed in this paper. Virtual 3D lenses that have the same functions as real lenses were generated in a 3D space of a CG application by combining some basic objects, such as cylinders, spheres, and boxes. A still image, which was synthesized for integral photography in advance, was texture-mapped onto a box, and the image was observed using a virtual camera that moved horizontally and vertically through the virtual lenses mentioned above. We simulated a kind of integral photography that used two mutually perpendicular lenticular sheets using this method. The results indicated that the proposed method is applicable for designing and evaluating 3D display systems.
Kazuhisa Yanaka, Yuki Takahashi, Hideo Kasuga, "Optical Simulation of Integral Photography using Computer Graphics" in Proc. IS&T Int'l Conf. on Digital Printing Technologies (NIP22), 2006, pp 335 - 338, https://doi.org/10.2352/ISSN.2169-4451.2006.22.1.art00005_2