A new advance by Hewlett Packard researchers, announced this week in Nature,
could put 3D video in the palm of your hand within the next few years.
The new tech is an autostereoscopic multiview 3D display. In English,
that's glasses-free 3D imaging you can see from any angle.
Three-dimensional viewing works by making each eye see an image from a
slightly different perspective, as we do when viewing real-life objects.
Glasses make this easy, as they can filter out two simultaneously
projected images so that each eye sees only one. But glasses-free 3D has been a goal of TV and mobile developers for a while now,
because wearing 3D glasses at home is annoying, and relying on glasses
to view 3D images on your tablet or cellphone would be downright
ridiculous.
Current or glasses-free tech works by projecting two images in different
directions—as opposed to 2D screens, which have pixels that send light
in all directions at once. The problem with this is that the viewer
needs to stand within a strict viewing field. If the viewer's nose isn't
precisely where it needs to be, his or her eyes won't pick up the right
images.
David Fattal, the HP researcher in charge of the project, believes HP's
new display—which uses a multiview backlight to scatter light in precise
directions, allowing for as many as 64 perspectives of the image—will
be the next big thing in 3D tech.
"Unlike a lot of tech out there," he says, "this makes 3D images for the
full parallax, meaning you can move your head in any direction and any
angle and still see 3D—just like [looking at] Princess Leia's hologram."
Essentially, in a 64-bit display, the backlight produces 64 2D displays
that merge together, each independently rendering images to suit one
perspective in the 180-degree viewing field. HP actually demonstrated up
to 200 views, but 64 is a balance between spatial resolution (the pixel
size is comparable with that in a laptop) and the size of pixels in a
liquid-crystal display. The team is looking for alternatives to liquid
crystals, as smaller pixels will allow them to have more images in the
display. However, Fattal says he "can't discuss it, because [he is]
hoping you can read about it soon in another Nature paper."
