Prototype display enables visitors to observe a three-D film from any seat in a theater

3-D movies immerse us in new worlds and allow us to look locations and things in approaches that we otherwise couldn't. but at the back of every 3-D enjoy is something this is uniformly despised: those goofy glasses.

luckily, there may be hope. In a new paper, a crew from MIT's laptop technology and synthetic Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) and Israel's Weizmann Institute of science have proven a display that shall we audiences watch 3-D films in a movie theater without more eyewear.

Dubbed "Cinema 3-D," the prototype uses a unique array of lenses and mirrors to enable visitors to observe a 3-D film from any seat in a theater.

"current strategies to glasses-loose 3-D require screens whose decision requirements are so extensive that they're completely impractical," says MIT professor Wojciech Matusik, one of the co-authors on a associated paper whose first creator is Weizmann PhD Netalee Efrat. "that is the primary technical method that permits for glasses-free 3-D on a big scale."

whilst the researchers caution that the system is not presently market-equipped, they're positive that destiny versions may want to push the generation to an area wherein theaters might be able to offer glasses-free alternatives for three-D films.

most of the paper's co-authors are MIT research technician Mike Foshey; former CSAIL postdoc Piotr Didyk; and  Weizmann researchers that encompass Efrat and professor Anat Levin. Efrat will present the paper at this week's SIGGRAPH computer-graphics convention in Anaheim, California.

how it works

Glasses-loose three-D already exists, however no longer in a manner that scales to film theaters. traditional methods for television units use a chain of slits in the front of the display screen (a "parallax barrier") that allows every eye to peer a distinctive set of pixels, growing a simulated experience of depth.

however because parallax boundaries have to be at a regular distance from the viewer, this approach isn't always realistic for large spaces like theaters which have viewers at special angles and distances.

other strategies, together with one from the MIT Media Lab, involve developing absolutely new bodily projectors that cowl the entire angular range of the audience. however, this often comes at a value of lower photo-decision.

the key insight with Cinema 3-D is that humans in film theaters move their heads only over a completely small variety of angles, restricted by means of the width of their seat. therefore, it is enough to show pictures to a narrow range of angles and reflect that to all seats in the theater.

  What Cinema 3-D does, then, is encode multiple parallax boundaries in a single display, such that each viewer sees a parallax barrier tailor-made to their role. That variety of views is then replicated across the theater by using a series of mirrors and lenses within Cinema three-D's special optics device.

"With a three-D television, you have to account for people shifting round to observe from distinct angles, which means that you have to divide up a restrained range of pixels to be projected so that the viewer sees the photo from anywhere they may be," says Gordon Wetzstein, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at Stanford university, who become no longer concerned in the studies. "The authors [of Cinema 3-D] cleverly exploited the fact that theaters have a unique set-up wherein every person sits in a greater or less fixed function the entire time."

The team demonstrated that their approach allows visitors from different elements of an auditorium to peer photographs of always high decision.

Cinema three-D isn't always in particular practical in the intervening time: The group's prototype calls for 50 sets of mirrors and lenses, and yet is just slightly larger than a pad of paper. but, in principle, the generation should work in any context in which 3-D visuals would be shown to more than one people on the same time, including billboards or storefront classified ads. Matusik says that the team hopes to construct a bigger model of the show and to in addition refine the optics to hold to improve the image decision.

"It stays to be visible whether the technique is financially viable enough to scale up to a complete-blown theater," says Matusik. "however we're positive that that is an critical next step in developing glasses-loose three-D for huge spaces like film theaters and auditoriums."