Optical Systems That Display Different 2-D and/or 3-D Images to Different Observers from a Single Display

Abstract

An image display system provides a viewer with an experience of three-dimensional imagery by presenting a composite image made up of at least two separate images. The system includes at least first and second image sources, a beam combiner, and a “background-image-occluding element” which prevents background imagery from being seen through foreground image elements. The system presents the image from one of the image sources, containing background image information, at a distance from the viewer which is greater than the distance from the viewer to the other image presented from the other image source, which contains foreground image elements. The “background-image-occluding element” is positioned at the same optical distance from the viewer as the image containing foreground image elements, eliminating any parallax error between them, enabling the foreground image elements to always occlude appropriate areas of the background image, regardless of the viewer's position or the background image brightness relative to the brightness of foreground image elements.

1 . An optical system for mutually exclusively directing views from each of a multiplicity of portions of an image source to each of a multiplicity of observers, comprising:
 an image source having a display area; and   a view splitter located on the display area of the image source, the view splitter comprising one or more elements partitioning the display area into multiple partitions, each partition presenting a view of only a portion of the display area to an observer.   
   
   
       2 . The optical system of  claim 1 , further comprising a beamcombiner configured to co-align a first sub-portion of a view representing a background image with a second sub-portion of the view representing a foreground image. 
   
   
       3 . The optical system of  claim 1  including at least one mirror. 
   
   
       4 . The optical system of  claim 3  including at least one semi-transparent mirror. 
   
   
       5 . The optical system of  claim 3  including at least one lens. 
   
   
       6 . An optical system that directs the information from at least two different portions of a display to at least two different observers such that each observer is able to mainly concentrate on the information from a subset of the displayed information from said display. 
   
   
       7 . The optical system of  claim 6  which includes at least one mirror. 
   
   
       8 . The optical system of  claim 7  which includes at least one semi-transparent mirror. 
   
   
       9 . The optical system of  claim 7  which includes at least one lens.