Aerial Imaging System to Reproduce Reflections in Specular Surfaces

A table-top reflective aerial imaging system can display digital information as if it existed on a specular horizontal surface, such as a marble or acrylic table-top. This system allows a user sitting in a chair to naturally look down at an aerial image displayed on a table, thus integrating the aerial image into daily life. However, although it displays an aerial image on a specular surface, it does not reproduce the reflected image, thus failing to achieve optical consistency. To improve the presence of aerial images, we propose a new table-top reflective aerial imaging system that not only displays aerial images on a specular surface but also reproduces the reflected images in that surface. The proposed system consists of an aerial imaging optical system that can display independent aerial images on and in a specular surface, and a reflected image reproduction method that designs the luminance of the aerial image inside the specular surface according to the actual measured material reflectance. We implemented a prototype to verify the principle of aerial imaging optics and evaluated the naturalness of the reflected image reproduced by our method through user experimentation. The results show that the difference between the material of the specular surface and the shape of the aerial image affects whether the reflected image produced by the proposed method is perceived as natural or not.