Stereoscopic 3D display technique using spatiotemporal interlacing has improved spatial and temporal properties

Stereoscopic 3D (S3D) displays use spatial or temporal interlacing to send different images to the two eyes. Temporal interlacing delivers images to the left and right eyes alternately in time; it has high effective spatial resolution but is prone to temporal artifacts. Spatial interlacing delivers even pixel rows to one eye and odd rows to the other eye simultaneously; it is subject to spatial limitations such as reduced spatial resolution. We propose a spatiotemporal-interlacing protocol that interlaces the left- and right-eye views spatially, but with the rows being delivered to each eye alternating with each frame. We performed psychophysical experiments and found that flicker, motion artifacts, and depth distortion are substantially reduced relative to the temporal-interlacing protocol, and spatial resolution is better than in the spatial-interlacing protocol. Thus, the spatiotemporal-interlacing protocol retains the benefits of spatial and temporal interlacing while minimizing or even eliminating the drawbacks.