A hand-held 3D display system that facilitates direct manipulation of 3D virtual objects

Digital 3D media has become more and more popular in recent years because of the availability of various 3D displaying devices. However, such 3D displaying devices are either limited in display size, mobility and weight. They can be extremely expensive too. In this paper, we proposed a movable 3D display system which uses a projector to project 3D display content onto an ordinary cardboard without any special patterns printed on it or any special sensors attached to it. The 3D perception is created by motion parallax. That means the user can observe different views of the virtual 3D object by adjusting the orientation of the projected cardboard. Such a system can give users greater freedom of control such as the viewing angle and distance, so the user can directly manipulate the virtual objects without using other indirect pointing devices such as a mouse. At the same time, the size of the cardboard can be made to a size that fits one's application. In our system, a projector-camera pair is calibrated and used as the tracking and projection system. We use a vision based algorithm to detect and track the display subsequent motion. Display content is then transformed, pre-warped and projected onto the cardboard. Experimental results show that our system can allow the user to view and directly manipulate a 3D virtual object on a movable cardboard by using motion parallax.