Viewing Angle Expansion for Light Field Displays by Crosstalk Suppression with Thin Directional Mesh

Light field displays offer promising autostereoscopic 3D visualization with continuous parallax, full-color reproduction, and natural depth cues. In practice, ray-tracing simulation is often employed to evaluate the effective viewing zone of light field systems. However, the actual viewing zone in conventional light field systems is significantly smaller than the simulated value, severely limited by narrow viewing angles due to crosstalk from adjacent elemental images. This study proposes an isolated microlens array (i-MLA) architecture incorporating a custom directional mesh (DM)—a 3D-printed light-blocking barrier grid with tapered pitch—to physically isolate each lenslet and completely suppress crosstalk. Combined with optimized extended coding pitch for a target viewing distance, ray-tracing simulations and experiments on a 13.3-inch 4K display with a 7 mm and 5.4 mm pitch MLA demonstrate dramatic improvement. The conventional light field system provides only a 3.4° margin, which is below the minimum angular separation required for binocular viewing, whereas the i-MLA system achieves a 7.4° margin—twice that of the conventional system. Compared with conventional systems, the i-MLA architecture does not increase overall volume; it simply replaces the glass gap with a single, simple optical element to achieve a wider viewing angle while preserving the compact form factor.