The MIT Media Lab’s Camera Culture group wrote a paper outlining a new type of glasses-free 3D technology. The technology, called Tensor Display, uses layers of LCD displays to create a 3D illusion.
Tensor refers to “compressive displays that can create a wide field of view by splitting a 3D image into 2D slices for processing, in a similar way to a CAT scan,” according to Electronics Weekly.
The display requires a refresh rate of 360 hertz. Current LCD TVs have a 240 hertz refresh rate, suggesting that 360 may not be too far away from reality.
One of the authors of the paper, Douglas Lanman, explained that while many people see holograms as the future of 3D, “The problem, of course, is that holograms don’t move. To make them move, you need to create a hologram in real time, and to do that, you need … little tiny pixels, smaller than anything we can build at large volume at low cost. So the question is, what do we have now? We have LCDs. They’re incredibly mature, and they’re cheap.”
To create different perspectives from different angles, the scientists display different patterns on screens at different depths. Not all aspects of a scene change relative to the viewing angle, so the scientists use algorithms to isolate and change only the aspects that need to change with movement.
“This quality, called ‘multiview 3D,’ simulates the act of looking at an object in a whole new way,” reports the Huffington Post. “If you were to watch an outdoors scene, for example, and looked up at the screen while lying on the floor, you might be able to see up to the sky, even if it’s not visible when the screen is viewed straight-on. The fact that each of your eyes will see objects on the screen from slightly different angles will help create the illusion that you’re looking at something truly three-dimensional.”
“It’s definitely suitable for commercial applications, because each component is commonplace, and it sounds easy to manufacture, so this ought to be something that a consumer-electronics company would license,” explains Gregg Favalora, principal at the engineering consultancy Optics for Hire. “Honestly, this is a really big deal.”
This has been reported on before. As Nick Holliman says, it may be too computationally intensive to be practical for consumer 3D TV in the near future, but it could be useful for public space 3D.
Philip LelyveldJuly 23, 2012 at 02:43am
This has been reported on before. As Nick Holliman says, it may be too computationally intensive to be practical for consumer 3D TV in the near future, but it could be useful for public space 3D.
The MIT Media Lab’s Camera Culture group wrote a paper outlining a new type of glasses-free 3D technology. The technology, called Tensor Display, uses layers of LCD displays to create a 3D illusion.
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This has been reported on before. As Nick Holliman says, it may be too computationally intensive to be practical for consumer 3D TV in the near future, but it could be useful for public space 3D.
This has been reported on before. As Nick Holliman says, it may be too computationally intensive to be practical for consumer 3D TV in the near future, but it could be useful for public space 3D.
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