Moiré modeling in 3D displays: a dominant component approximation using indicial and cosinusoidal approaches

Autostereoscopic 3D panels in augmented reality head-up displays use periodic optics to overlay pixel grids, creating a moiré effect. It is essential to predict this in advance to ensure display quality in virtual and augmented reality. The moiré effect in three-dimensional displays arises from the interference between the display panel’s pixel grid and periodic optical elements such as lenticular lenses or parallax barriers. While periodic gratings inherently exhibit infinitely many frequency components, analyzing them directly is impractical. In this work, we propose a dominant component approximation that models the moiré phenomenon using both indicial representation and cosinusoidal approximation, and demonstrate that these two approaches yield identical predictions for the moiré period and angle. We further validate the proposed approximation experimentally using physically fabricated autostereoscopic 3D displays with two lenticular lenses at multiple slanted angles, achieving strong agreement between simulation and measured results.