Real-time 3D Visualization of Radiance Fields on Light Field Displays

Abstract

Radiance fields, including their recent efficient forms such as 3D Gaussian Splatting and Sparse Voxels, have revolutionized photorealistic 3D scene visualization by enabling high-fidelity reconstruction of complex environments, making them a natural match for light field displays. However, integrating these technologies presents significant computational challenges, as light field displays require many high-resolution renderings from slightly shifted viewpoints, while radiance fields rely on computationally intensive volume rendering, which is intractable to achieve real-time speeds even with efficient scene representations. In this paper, we propose a unified and efficient framework for real-time radiance field rendering on light field displays. Rather than re-rendering each view independently, our method converts the input radiance field into shared intermediate sweeping planes that can be efficiently composited into dense light-field views in a single pass. Our method prioritizes shared, non-directional plane caching for real-time performance, trading fine view-dependent color effects for a modest increase in intermediate memory usage. Our framework generalizes across different scene representations without retraining and avoids repeated computation across views. We further demonstrate a real-time interactive application on a Looking Glass display, achieving 200+ FPS at 512p across 45 rendered views and enabling seamless, immersive 3D interactive viewing experiences. On standard benchmarks, our method achieves up to 22x speedup compared to independently rendering each view, while largely preserving image quality.