five: Enhancing 3D Wall Displays with a 2D High-Resolution Overlay

Projection-based stereoscopic wall displays allow users to immerse themselves into virtual scenes, such as architecture simulations or games. However, the usually low resolution (dpi) of such displays and slight alignment offsets between the two projectors result in a loss of detail and bad readability of textual information. We propose addressing the problem by overlaying a third projector, so that its image is visible to both eyes. We eliminate offset artifacts by extracting 2D contents from the scene and rendering it using this dedicated “2D projector”. In addition, we locally increase resolution by focusing the 2D projector onto a smaller region. This allows us to reduce the size of overlaid 2D annotations, thereby reducing interference with the 3D scene. In our paper, we describe the design of our display system called five. Following, we present two detailed user studies that compare five with an overview-and-detail and a pan-and-zoom interface.