Designing perspectively correct multiplanar displays

Displays remain flat and passive amidst the many changes in their fundamental technologies. One natural step ahead is to create displays that merge seamlessly in shape and appearance with one’s natural surroundings. In this paper, we present a system to design, render to, and build view-dependent multiplanar displays of arbitrary piecewise-planar shapes, built using polygonal facets. Our system provides high quality, interactive rendering of 3D environments to a head-tracked viewer on arbitrary multiplanar displays. We develop a novel rendering scheme that produces exact image and depth map at each facet, producing artifact-free images on and across facet boundaries. The system scales to a large number of display facets by rendering all facets in a single pass of rasterization. This is achieved using a parallel, perframe, view-dependent binning and prewarping of scene triangles. The display is driven using one or more target quilt images into which facet pixels are packed. Our method places no constraints on the scene or the display and allows for fully dynamic scenes to be rendered interactively at high resolutions. The steps of our system are implemented efficiently on commodity GPUs. We present a few prototype displays to establish the scalability of our system on different display shapes, form factors, and complexity: from a cube made out of LCD panels to spherical/cylindrical projected setups to arbitrary complex shapes in simulation. Performance of our system is demonstrated for both rendering quality and speed, for increasing scene and display facet sizes. A subjective user study is also presented to evaluate the user experience using a walk-around display compared to a flat panel for a game-like setting.