Real-Time Light-Field Path Tracing for 3D Displays via Sparse Spatial-Angular-Temporal Reconstruction

This paper presents a modern, comprehensive system for real-time light field path tracing, addressing the prohibitive computational overhead inherent in driving high-density 3D displays. While offering immersive glasses-free 3D experiences, these displays necessitate the synthesis of massive angular information across numerous viewpoints to satisfy their optical requirements. Conventional rendering pipelines often overlook the hardware’s intrinsic spatial-angular mapping, resulting in redundant computations and extreme ray counts that preclude interactive performance. We resolve this by reformulating light field synthesis as a sparse signal reconstruction task on a high-dimensional manifold. We introduce a unified algebraic framework governed by three mathematical primitives that respectively decouple rendering logic from heterogeneous optical hardware, establish deterministic geometric connectivity across disparate viewpoints, and enable atomic access to unstructured sparse data. Leveraging this formalism, we propose a geometry-driven active sensing pipeline. By modulating a stochastic checkerboard sampling pattern with local disparity cues and coupling this with 5D temporal accumulation and unified spatio-angular integration, our method proactively allocates ray budgets to geometrically complex regions. We demonstrate a complete end-to-end system capable of driving 8K light field displays at interactive frame rates using a single consumer GPU. Our approach not only significantly outperforms existing baselines in computational efficiency and reconstruction fidelity but also naturally supports complex modern light transport effects. Project Page: https://coronaengine.github.io/ssat-page