Having a display that can support ocular accommodation (selective focus by the eye) is an important research development, though it will most likely not change

Having a display that can support ocular accommodation (selective focus by the eye) is an important research development, though it will most likely not change the viewer's experience in a radical way. Practical electronic 3D displays requires bandwidth reduction, both data bandwidth for transmission and optical bandwidth to create practical or lower-cost optical modulators. The goal is to use bandwidth reduction techniques that produce little or no visual artifacts. Some of the techniques used are the same as in 2D (spatial discretization, time multiplexing, compression), while others are unique to 3D (view discretization, limits on view angle, elimination of coherence). Head-mounted displays are basically descendants of stereoscopes, the first 3D displays developed by Wheatstone in 1838. Wheatstone's amazing discovery was that you can throw a huge amount of information about the world away, provide just two images from two viewpoints, project them out to infinity in front of a viewer's two eyes using two lenses/light paths, and a vivid sense of 3D is evoked. That's an incredible amount of information reduction from real life. In the traditional stereoscope, accommodation is thrown away, mostly because its really hard to recreate electro-mechanically, but also because we're generally fine with it. Accommodation isn't effective for distant objects (or for even larger depth ranges as we get older we lose our ability to accommodate), so we likely have neural circuitry to discount imperfect accommodation cues. One of the reasons we turn on bright lights when doing detailed work is to stop our eyes down and increase our depth of field, reducing the need for accommodation. However, there have been perennial debates about the physiological impact of conflicting depth cues involving accommodation, and those debates are more interesting in VR where objects can be (virtually) very close to the viewer and the viewer can dynamically change their physical relationship with virtual objects. Until you have a light modulator that can let you experiment with selectively modulating accommodation within a scene, you can't provide real data on how important accommodation (even approximate accommodation) is for a particular application. Can't wait to see the studies. We did some similar focal plane manipulation in holographic video more than a decade ago, for related reasons (see Fig 7): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/255603167_Reconfigurable_image_projection_holograms https://www.researchgate.net/publication/255603167_Reconfigu...