Switchable lens design for multi-view 2D/3D switching display with wide-viewing window

Abstract

We improved the three-dimensional (3D) crosstalk level of multi-view 3D displays using a lens array with small f-number, thereby facilitating a wide 3D viewing window. In particular, we designed a polarization-dependent-switching liquid crystal (LC)-based gradient refractive index (GRIN) lens array that could be switched between 2D and 3D viewing modes. For the GRIN lens with a small f-number (1.08), we studied the effect of the interfacial curvature between the plano-concave isotropic polymer layer and the plano-convex birefringent LC layer on the aberration properties. We examined the conventional spherical, quadratic polynomial aspherical, and a high-order (fourth-order) polynomial aspherical curvature. For the high-order polynomial aspherical curvature, the achievable transverse spherical aberration (TSA = 10.2 µm) was considerably lower than that with the spherical (TSA = 100.3 µm) and quadratic polynomial aspherical (TSA = 30.4 µm) curvatures. Consequently, the angular luminance distributions for each view were sharper for the high-order polynomial interfacial curvature. We designed multi-view (43-view) 3D displays using the arrays of switchable LC lenses with different curvatures, and the average adjacent crosstalk levels within the entire viewing window (50◦) were 68.5%, 73.3%, and 60.0% for the spherical, quadratic polynomial aspherical, and high-order polynomial aspherical curvatures, respectively.