DirectL: Efficient Radiance Fields Rendering for 3D Light Field Displays

Autostereoscopic display technology, despite decades of development, has not achieved extensive application, primarily due to the daunting challenge of three-dimensional (3D) content creation for non-specialists. The emergence of Radiance Field as an innovative 3D representation has markedly revolutionized the domains of 3D reconstruction and generation, simplifying 3D content creation for common users and broadening the applicability of Light Field Displays (LFDs). However, the combination of these two technologies remains largely unexplored. The standard paradigm to create optimal content for parallax-based light field displays demands rendering at least 45 slightly shifted views preferably at high resolution per frame, a substantial hurdle for real-time rendering. We introduce DirectL, a novel rendering paradigm for Radiance Fields on autostereoscopic displays with lenticular lens. By thoroughly analyzing the interleaved mapping of spatial rays to screen sub-pixels, we accurately render only the light rays entering the human eye and propose subpixel repurposing to significantly reduce the pixel count required for rendering. Tailored for the two predominant radiance fields---Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), we propose corresponding optimized rendering pipelines that directly render the light field images instead of multi-view images, achieving state-of-the-art rendering speeds on autostereoscopic displays. Extensive experiments across various autostereoscopic displays and user visual perception assessments demonstrate that DirectL accelerates rendering by up to 40 times compared to the standard paradigm without sacrificing visual quality. Its rendering process-only modification allows seamless integration into subsequent radiance field tasks. Finally, we incorporate DirectL into diverse applications, showcasing the stunning visual experiences and the synergy between Light Field Displays and Radiance Fields, which reveals the immense potential for application prospects. DirectL Project Homepage: direct-l.github.io