Sharpness and noise characteristics of a half‐mirror stereoscopic display

Stereoscopic displays are becoming popular in entertainment and industrial applications. We characterize the spatial resolution and noise properties of a stereoscopic display with a half‐mirror and passive polarizing glasses. The upper display images reflected off the mirror have slightly degraded sharpness and reduced high spatial‐frequency noise resulting in modulation transfer functions (MTFs) of 0.59 and 0.50 at the Nyquist frequency with corresponding noise power spectra (NPS) values of 4.79 × 10^?6 and 5.17 × 10^?6 mm² at 10 mm^?1 in the horizontal and vertical directions. These results are compared to the characteristics of the individual displays with MTF values of 0.64 and 0.53 and NPS values of 6.24 × 10^?6 and 5.87 × 10^?6 mm². The polarizing glasses cause minimal reduction in sharpness and high‐frequency noise. The MTFs in the upper images observed with glasses are decreased to 0.54 and 0.47, while the NPS are decreased to 2.86 × 10^?6 and 2.01 × 10^?6 mm². When both displays are turned on and using the mirror and glasses, the observed luminance for each eye is increased from the luminance of the individual displays owing to crosstalk. We find that sharpness and noise are not affected by the interaction between the displays at the particular geometry tested in this study.