With the new technology, it will be possible to eliminate the 3D glasses in cinemas, but there has to be the new screen installed.
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Matusik added that the project is “an important next step” to develop the true glasses-free 3-D movies theater experience which could be rolled out in the following years or so as the demand goes up considering that most of the films coming out can benefit from the tech. “That range of views is then replicated across the theater by a series of mirrors and lenses within Cinema 3D’s special optics system”.
The MIT Computers Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) set out to create a display that lets people see the 3D effect in a movie theater, from any seat in the house – no glasses required.
Glasses-free 3D technology already exists, but not on the scale needed in movie theaters.
But because parallax barriers have to be at a consistent distance from the viewer, this approach isn’t practical for larger spaces like theaters that have viewers at different angles and distances. Their design, called Cinema 3D and unveiled today in a research paper, is no less bulky and cumbersome than Toshiba’s 5-year-old laptop, but it could overcome another key limitation of the technology: narrow viewing angles.
Cinema 3D works under the theory that movie-goers usually move their heads in a small range of angles, given the limited areas allotted to them. “To achieve this, it uses an optical construction based on two sets of parallax barriers, or lenslets, placed in front of a standard screen”. Another benefit to the Cinema 3D approach by CSAIL and the Weiszmann institute is that it preserves resolution, providing a crisp image to every viewer. “The authors [of Cinema 3D] cleverly exploited the fact that theaters have a unique setup in which every person sits in a more or less fixed position the whole time”. Although the prototype is barely the size of a pad of paper, it now requires 50 sets of mirrors and lenses, which may not be enough to produce high quality image resolution.
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Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are trying to come up with a way to revolutionize 3-D movie theatres by ditching the use of the 3-D glasses.
