Backward ray tracing based high-speed visual simulation for light field display and experimental verification

The exiting simulation method is not capable of achieving three-dimensional (3D) display result of the light field display (LFD) directly, which is important for design and optimization. Here, a high-speed visual simulation method to calculate the 3D image light field distribution is presented. Based on the backward ray tracing technique (BRT), the geometric and optical models of the LFD are constructed. The display result images are obtained, and the field of view angle (FOV) and depth of field (DOF) can be estimated, which are consistent with theoretical results and experimental results. The simulation time is 1s when the number of sampling rays is 3840×2160×100, and the computational speed of the method is at least 1000 times faster than that of the traditional physics-based renderer. A prototype was fabricated to evaluate the feasibility of the proposed method. From the results, our simulation method shows good potential for predicting the displayed image of the LFD for various positions of the observer’s eye with sufficient calculation speed.