Grants and Contributions:

Grant or Award spanning more than one fiscal year. (2017-2018 to 2022-2023)

Recent years have seen intensified research on and burgeoning commercial interests in a new generation of optoelectronic displays, driven by a wide range of virtual, augmented and mixed reality applications in diversified fields from man-machine interactions, medicine, entertainment, to automobile, etc. Steady progress in the raw capabilities of display hardware and computers are the other important catalysts for the great enthusiasm in advanced display technologies on all sides: academia, industry and Wall Street. Many display functionalities that were considered prohibitively expensive can now be offered at acceptable costs. Just as the importance of inventing paper and printing machines to ancient civilizations, the potential of advanced high-tech display technologies cannot be overstated, which may shape the ways we communicate, learn, play, or even behave.

This research is to advance my recent ground-breaking work of temporal psychovisual modulation (TPVM), which is a new paradigm of computational display that can potentially revolutionize the design of and user experiences with visual man-machine interfaces. Through an ingenious interplay of psychophysics, optoelectronics and mathematical modeling of human vision, TPVM can present multiple users different interference-free views simultaneously on the same display medium. It is ideally suited for multiuser collaborative virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). Unlike Google Glasses, Oculus’s Rift and Microsoft’s Hololens, the end user viewing devices in the TPVM computational display system are simplified to light, simple, display-synchronized liquid crystal glasses. All heavy computations and complex optics required for generating eye-tracking 3D virtual environment are delegated to a central, powerful rendering engine and a high-speed display. Besides VR/AR, TPVM also has other exciting applications: anti-piracy displays, backward compatible 3D/2D displays, display-camera visible light communication, and privacy-protection displays.

Scientifically and philosophically speaking, holography should be the ultimate display technology that may threaten to blur the boundary of mind and body. But due to daunting engineering difficulties in making holograms, people always seek for more practical alternatives. Recently, some futuristic 4D light field displays emerged, represented by Magic Leap’s head-mounted virtual retinal display and MIT Media Lab’s tensor display; both fall into the category of computational displays like TPVM. In this research I will also launch an academic pursuit to gain theoretical understanding of the 2D/3D signal representation capacities of the aforementioned computational displays.