MIT Developed A Movie Screen That Brings Glasses-Free 3D To All Seats (techcrunch.com)

An anonymous reader writes from a report via TechCrunch: MIT has developed a glasses-less 3D display for movie theaters. The Nintendo 3DS is one of a handful of devices to feature glasses-less 3D, but it is designed for a single users where the user is looking at the display head-on at a relatively specific angle. It's not something made for a movie theater with hundreds of seats, each of which would have a different viewing angle. What's neat about MIT's 3D display is that it doesn't require glasses and it lets anyone see the 3D effect in a movie theater, no matter where they are sitting. The MIT Computers Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) created the prototype display called 'Cinema 3D' that uses a complex arrangement of lenses and mirrors to create a set number of parallax barriers that can address every viewing angle in the theater based on seat locations. It works in a movie theater because the seats are in fixed locations, and people don't tend to move around, change seats or alter their viewing angle too much. What's also neat about the Cinema 3D is that is preserves resolution, whereas other glasses-less 3D displays carry cots in terms of image resolution. The prototype is about the size of a letter-sized notepad, and it needs 50 sets of mirrors and lenses. It should be ready for market once researchers scale it up to a commercially viable product.

Comments

Re:Interesting sleep arrangement

[mark-t]

Can someone enlighten me as to approximately when the expression "begs the question" started to mean "raises the question", instead of the informal fallacy of assuming that an unproven premise is true as part of a conclusion?

Its not wearing glasses that causes headaches

[mark-t]

It's the forced stereoscopy.... when you project different images into each eye, unless you are sitting only at certain spots in the movie theater, the angle that your eyes will have to converge to fuse the two images into a single 3d image in your visual cortex is unnatural with respect the distance that the visual differences between the two objects conveys to your brain about the apparently distance of what you are seeing.

Holograms would not have this effect, since where you are focusing on when you view a hologram is consistent with where the 3d image actually is supposed to be. The image appears as fully 3 dimensional as would looking at real physical objects on the other side of a pane of clear glass, or looking at things in a mirror.

But I imagine we're still some years away from real holographic movies being a thing.