They’re calling it HR3D and it could double the battery life of devices without compromising screen brightness or resolution. Also, wider angles and multiple perspectives! You can share the 3D joy! Sound great but how are they doing it?
The MIT researchers’ HR3D system uses two layers of liquid-crystal displays. But instead of displaying vertical bands, as the 3DS does, or pinholes, as a multiperspective parallax-barrier system would, the top LCD displays a pattern customised to the image beneath it.
Going into the project, the researchers had no idea what the customised pattern would look like. But once they’d done the math, they found that the ideal pattern ends up looking a lot like the source image. Instead of consisting of a few big, vertical slits, the parallax barrier consists of thousands of tiny slits, whose orientations follow the contours of the objects in the image.
So they’re not using the 3DS’ parallax barrier (two versions of the same image, one for right eye and one for left sliced into vertical segments) but uses a barrier that changes with the image, a more versatile method. Right now though, it requires a lot of computational power to spit out the perfect barrier for the image. If they can simplify it, maybe we’ll have legitimate glasses-free 3DTVs that work for everyone. [MIT via Pop Sci]
TSH
Thursday, May 5, 2011 at 4:37 PM… still not sure how that eliminates the “sweet spot” problem.
3D with glasses isn’t so bad if you’re not relying on expensive active-shutter designs – in the cinema you’re just wearing glasses with specially polarised lenses.
It boggles my mind that nobody’s figured out how to rapidly polarise an LCD/plasma panel – or if they have, why nobody’s going for that instead of active-shutter glasses.
Ogre
Thursday, May 5, 2011 at 6:23 PMBecause that wouldn’t do anything. The stereoscopic 3D approach requires a different image to appear in each eye. Polarising the panel itself would just mean each alternate frame has it’s light polarised in alternating directions, which would still appear in both eyes.
The whole point of the active shutter glasses is that an LCD panel naturally has a polarisation anyway, so switching a pair of electrically activated polarisers, synchronised with alternate frames, will cause each eye to see a different image.
BCK
Thursday, May 5, 2011 at 6:47 PMLG already has. Search “LG Cinema 3D”
The reason nobody wants to do it is due to the reduction in image quality.
Each eye receiving 540 lines of resolution instead of the full 1080p
warcroft
Thursday, May 5, 2011 at 8:47 PMBecause home 3D glasses cost, what, $100?
Cinema 3D glasses cost $1.
Id say it comes down to milking the gullible consumer.
TvZ
Thursday, May 5, 2011 at 4:45 PMAnd that is why I’ll hold off buying a 3D TV for now.
BCK
Thursday, May 5, 2011 at 6:48 PMFrom this year, you might not have a choice!