A system and methods for a CODEC driving a real-time light field display for multi-dimensional video streaming, interactive gaming and other light field display applications is provided applying a layered scene decomposition strategy. Multi-dimensional scene data is divided into a plurality of data layers. One or more polygons representative of corresponding portions of objects in the scene are obtained for each layer and used to determine a view-independent representation. This view independent representation and data layers are sampled using a plenoptic sampling scheme and rendered using hybrid rendering to encode light fields corresponding to each data layer. The resulting compressed, (layered) core representation of the multi-dimensional scene data is produced at predictable rates, reconstructed and merged at the light field display in real-time by applying view synthesis protocols, including edge adaptive interpolation, to reconstruct pixel arrays in stages (e.g. columns then rows) from reference elemental images.