Image credit – Christine Daniloff/MIT
Glasses-free 3D displays aren’t new. We’ve seen them on phones, the Nintendo 3DS, and on some TVs, but TVs are probably the biggest implementation that we’ve seen so far. Unfortunately for moviegoers, this means that you’ll still have to put on those clunky and uncomfortable glasses when you watch movies in 3D.
However that might not be the case in the future, thanks to the folks at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) who worked with Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science and have developed display technology that allows moviegoers to enjoy glasses-free 3D movies on a cinema scale dubbed “Cinema 3D”.
According to MIT who describes how the tech works, “What Cinema 3D does, then, is encode multiple parallax barriers in one display, such that each viewer sees a parallax barrier tailored to their position. That range of views is then replicated across the theater by a series of mirrors and lenses within Cinema 3D’s special optics system.”
This is versus current glasses-free 3D systems in which users need to view it at specific angles in order to achieve the 3D effect. Unfortunately before you get too excited, MIT notes that this technology isn’t quite ready for commercialization yet, but the researchers are confident that it could become a reality one day.