"Hands-on" Light Field Display via Engineering Scalable Optics, Algorithms, and Mounts

We present a scalable, “hands-on” light field display for shared, glasses-free Extended Reality (XR). Our system uses an array of mini-projectors, built from low-cost, off-the-shelf components, to project a 3D light field onto a directional diffuser screen. This provides multiple viewers with vivid scenes featuring continuous motion parallax and correct stereo parallax. Our core technical contributions are a systematic hardware and software pipeline. Hardware precision is bootstrapped using 3D-printed mounts and finalized with a camera-assisted calibration method that compensates for optical and geometric errors. A physically-based ray tracing algorithm ensures the final imagery is realistic. The integration of gesture tracking enables intuitive interaction, demonstrating a practical and accessible approach to building collaborative XR systems.

We present a scalable, “hands-on” light field display for shared, glasses-free Extended Reality (XR). Our system uses an array of mini-projectors built from low-cost, off-the-shelf components to provide multiple viewers with vivid 3D scenes featuring continuous motion parallax.