Finally a screen that lets movie goers view 3D minus those clunky glasses

There’s nothing quite like watching a visually-rich movie in 3D, but the experience has always been less than perfect because of those cludgy glasses that need to be worn. But if researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) and Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science have their way, this may soon be a thing of the past.

They have created a screen that could make it possible for every cinema-goer to experience 3D video no matter where they are seated in the theater, and without any glasses. The technology, known simply as Cinema 3D, is based on a screen that is composed of an array of specially-arranged lenses and mirrors.

“Existing approaches to glasses-free 3-D require screens whose resolution requirements are so enormous that they are completely impractical,” says MIT professor Wojciech Matusik, one of the co-authors of a related paper.

While comparable glasses-free solutions to 3D video do exist, they can only be implemented at smaller scales and not at cinema-level sizes. This new method takes into account the fact that movie-goers only move their heads by small amounts, typically limited by the width of their seats. Using this logic, the screen uses a series of slits in front of it, known as a parallax barrier, where each viewer in the theater is shown a parallax barrier specific to their position. Using the Cinema 3D’s system of optics, mirrors and lenses, this range of views is replicated to all seats in the theater, giving each viewer their own perspective of the 3D content.

The system is still under development where a working prototype has been created only at the size of a sheet of paper. The researchers claim that the technology could however scale to sizes approaching that of a billboard or a conventional cinema screen, while maintaining high image resolution.