A team from MIT’s Computer
Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) and Israel’s Weizmann Institute
of Science has demonstrated a display that lets you watch 3-D films in a movie
theater without extra eyewear. Dubbed ‘Cinema 3D’, the prototype uses a special
array of lenses and mirrors to enable viewers to watch a 3-D movie from any
seat in a theater. While the researchers caution that the system isn't currently
market-ready, they are optimistic that future versions could push the
technology to a place where theaters would be able to offer glasses-free
alternatives for 3D movies. Glasses-free 3-D already exists, but not in a way
that scales to movie theaters. Traditional methods for TV sets use a series of
slits in front of the screen that allow each eye to see a different set of
pixels, creating a simulated sense of depth.
But because parallax barriers
have to be at a consistent distance from the viewer, this approach isn't
practical for larger spaces like theaters that have viewers at different angles
and distances. Other methods, including one from the MIT Media Lab, involve
developing completely new physical projectors that cover the entire angular
range of the audience. However, this often comes at a cost of reduced image
resolution. The key insight with Cinema 3D is that people in movie theaters
move their heads only over a very small range of angles limited by the width of
their seat. Thus, it is enough to display a narrow range of angles and
replicate it to all seats in the theater. 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.
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