“Just enough reality”, microstereopsis, and the prospect of zoneless autostereoscopic displays

Just as color can be shouted in primary tones or whispered in soft pastel hues, so stereo can be shoved in your face or raised ever so gently off the screen plane. This paper reviews the problems with “in your face stereo” and demonstrates that “just enough reality” is both gentle and effective in achieving stereoscopy´s fundamental goal: resolving the front-back ambiguity inherent in 2D projections. Something unexpected and perhaps fortuitous falls out: soft stereo means small on-screen disparities, and when on-screen disparities are small, crosstalk is perceived as blur rather than as ghosting. Blur, particularly if it occurs only in the background and foreground (to which regions it can be relegated by “center-of-interest compensation”), is, in contrast to ghosting, quite unobjectionable. Gracefully accepting crosstalk may enable zoneless autostereoscopic displays