A toroidal-lens designed structure for static type table-top floating image system with horizontal parallax function

Abstract

A new structure of horizontal parallax table-top floating image system with toroidal-lens optical film was developed. In this design, the circular arranged pico-projectors limit the angular resolution of this system and display the floating image for surrounding viewing zones. In addition, the pinhole array and toroidal-lens layer compose the optical film in the system and correspond with each other; both of them could be considered as a repeatable unit to control the spatial resolution of image. After passing through the optical film, the direction, position, shape, and divergence angle of light field could be controlled as fan ray, which has a widely scattered angle in latitude and high directivity in longitude direction. Moreover, to confirm the optical properties, the proposed structure was built in the commercially optical software, LightTools v8.3, which is widely used in the simulation of light distribution. Based on the imaging principle and the inverse light tracking method, displaying floating image with circular viewing zones would be achieved.