SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the it's-done-by-smoke-and-mirrors,-but-without-the-smoke dept.
Researchers have created a glasses-free 3D display prototype that exploits the limited number of viewing angles offered by movie theaters:
In a new paper, a team from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) and Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science have demonstrated a display that lets audiences 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.
[...] 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 images to a narrow range of angles and replicate that 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. That range of views is then replicated across the theater by a series of mirrors and lenses within Cinema 3D's special optics system.
[...] Cinema 3D isn't particularly practical at the moment: The team's prototype requires 50 sets of mirrors and lenses, and yet is just barely larger than a pad of paper. But, in theory, the technology could work in any context in which 3-D visuals would be shown to multiple people at the same time, such as billboards or storefront advertisements. Matusik says that the team hopes to build a larger version of the display and to further refine the optics to continue to improve the image resolution.
Also at TechCrunch. MIT CSAIL video at YouTube (49 seconds).
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday July 26 2016, @05:21PM
The team's prototype requires 50 sets of mirrors and lenses, and yet is just barely larger than a pad of paper
When I was a kid, lets say 1980, we could buy postcard sized action pictures where there was a ribbed lens (usually vertical) relying on the focus moving as your head went side to side.
So a picture was printed in high res and it was glued to the ribbed lenses and then as you tilted the pix you saw the millenium falcon move and shoot or the dukes of hazzard jump or whatever.
There is probably a name for this printing technique although I have no idea what to google for and have not seen this in stores for some time.
Its was not terribly expensive. The kind of thing a kid would have on his pencil box (assuming kids today have pencil boxes) or it would be a rather expensive postcard sized pix like the cost of two candy bars.
Anyway I would imagine a ribbed array of 300 linear lens could be stuck to a HDTV to give the same effect, so you'd see a slightly different image based on the angle from the display.
I wonder what is so complex about this system such that it requires stacks of optical gear to do about the same thing.
(Score: 2) by Capt. Obvious on Tuesday July 26 2016, @07:23PM
The ribbing is called a lenticular image/lens. You can still see them around.
That technology has been used for 3D TVs, but it tends to only work well from one viewpoint. I have a 3D camera that uses that as the display, but you have to line up really well. It pops when it works. The most famous example is this is how they do 3D on the Nintendo 3DS.
Unlike other sterographic images, I found it really hard to create prints that worked with it. You can buy blank lenticular sheets, I think on Amazon. They come in a variety of pitches.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday July 26 2016, @07:43PM
Yes I can verify that is the word to google for.