Near-eye multi-focal (light field) displays are known to be more advantageous than conventional stereoscopic 3D displays, because they can alleviate the vergence-accommodation conflict. While stereoscopic 3D displays are restricted to projecting images on a single focal plane, near-eye light field displays can form multiple focal planes and volumetrically render 3D data. Most existing near-eye light field displays use simplistic, uniformly spaced focal plane configuration (in dioptric space). In this paper, we present a novel technique that optimizes the focal plane configuration based on characteristics of the content to be rendered. We show that this technique can significantly improve the perceived visual quality of content visualized on such displays.

We present a gonio-plenoptic imaging system that realizes a single-shot shape measurement for specular surfaces. The system is comprised of a collimated illumination source and a plenoptic camera. Unlike a conventional plenoptic camera, our system captures the BRDF variation of the object surface in a single image in addition to the light field information from the scene, which allows us to recover very fine 3D structures of the surface. The shape of the surface is reconstructed based on the reflectance property of the material rather than the parallax between different views. Since only a single-shot is required to reconstruct the whole surface, our system is able to capture dynamic surface deformation in a video mode. We also describe a novel calibration technique that maps the light field viewing directions from the object space to subpixels on the sensor plane. The proposed system is evaluated using a concave mirror with known curvature, and is compared to a parabolic mirror scanning system as well as a multi-illumination photometric stereo approach based on simulations and experiments.