New Tech Will Let You Watch 3D Films without Eyewear

If you are tired of wearing those awkward and irritating glasses while watching a 3D movie, here is a good news for you. A new technology named Cinema 3D has been developed. It can let you watch 3D movies without eyewear in a theatre.

With a special array of lenses and mirrors, this technology can enable viewers to watch a 3D movie from any seat in the theatre without glasses. According to researchers, by carefully designing the optical elements, very-good-quality 3D content can be achieved without using glasses. Though, not yet market-ready, Cinema 3D is the first technical approach that allows to watch 3D films without eyewear on a larger scale.

The researchers further added that they are quite positive that the future versions of this technology could push it to a place where theatres would be able to offer glasses-free alternatives for 3D movies.

Well, glasses-free 3D technology already exist. However, these are yet to be scaled up for movie theaters. For instance, glasses-free 3D technology developed for TV sets generally use a series of slits also known as parallax barrier, which is placed in front of the TV screen. These slits helps each eye to view different set of pixels, which in turn creates the illusion of depth.

For parallax barriers to function, they need to be placed at a fixed distance from viewers, which makes it difficult to implement in larger set ups such as theaters, where people sit at different distances and hence have diverse viewing angles from the screen.

As people sit at different locations in a theater, the limited number of pixels have to be divided in such a way that everyone is able to view the image no matter where they are seated.

Existing glasses-free 3D technology require screens whose resolution requirements are so massive making them completely impractical

However in the new method, researchers used a sequence of mirrors and lenses to provide viewers a parallax barrier tailored to each of their locations.

The researchers developed a basic Cinema 3D prototype capable of supporting a 200-pixel image. Volunteers who took part in the experiment were able to see 3D versions of pixelated figures from different locations in a small theater.

Though the experiment was successful the researchers cautioned that Cinema 3D cannot be implemented commercially yet as it is quite impractical. For example, the prototype required 50 sets of mirrors and lenses, for a screen that is hardly larger than a pad of paper.

It now remains to be seen whether or not the approach turns out to be economically feasible enough for a full blown movie theatre.

Let’s keep our fingers crossed and hope for the best!