Manufacturers have been showing off 3D screens that don't require dorky glasses for a few years, but the technology is cumbersome: a Toshiba laptop from 2011 had a red, rectangular-shaped box mounted to the back of the LCD that made it look vaguely like an Iron Man suit.
Now, MIT researchers are paving the way for a resurrection of glasses-free 3D technology. Their design, called Cinema 3D and unveiled today in a research paper, is no less bulky and cumbersome than Toshiba's 5-year-old laptop, but it could overcome another key limitation of the technology: narrow viewing angles.
Cinema 3D—designed by a team from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab and Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science—uses a special array of lenses and mirrors to enable viewers to watch a 3D movie from any seat in a theater. Instead of the parallax barrier found in other glasses-free 3D technology, their design uses physical projectors that can create a 3D experience calibrated for each seat.
"With a 3D TV, you have to account for people moving around to watch from different angles, which means that you have to divide up a limited number of pixels to be projected so that the viewer sees the image from wherever they are," Gordon Wetzstein, a Stanford electrical engineering professor who was not involved in the research, said in a statement. "The authors [of Cinema 3D] cleverly exploited the fact that theaters have a unique setup in which every person sits in a more or less fixed position the whole time."
That unique theater setup is also the key limitation of Cinema 3D: its elaborate system of 50 sets of mirrors and lenses has to be calibrated for each seat in a movie theater. So if the technology were ever to find its way into your living room, you'd have to anticipate and adjust it for every angle from which you might want to watch TV.
Still, its creators, including MIT professor Wojciech Matusik, are "optimistic that this is an important next step in developing glasses-free 3D for large spaces like movie theaters and auditoriums."