Invented screen for cinemas, not requiring glasses to watch 3D movies

The ingenious minds of engineers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology gave birth to technology, thanks to which the already familiar glasses for watching 3D movies in cinemas can sink into oblivion. And although in the hands of the inventors at the moment there is only a small prototype of a new generation screen, in the future such screens can appear in cinemas around the world. Thanks to this technology, every viewer of the cinema can see a three-dimensional image on the screen without any additional devices.

Parallax barrier technology is now widely used in consumer electronics and mobile gadgets. Recall at least some models of smartphones or the popular game console Nintendo 3DS. A person sees a three-dimensional image on the screen due to a special vertical grating located between it and the LCD screen. Through the slits in the grille, each of the two eyes sees its own frame of the video, shot at different angles. The brain compares the received data and converts them into a three-dimensional image. Everything is simple enough, if not for one thing: for the effective operation of this technology it is very important that the viewer is directly in the center of the parallax screen and look at it at a right angle. Shifting the viewer aside or tilting the head destroys the entire 3D effect.

Nintendo in its new console New 3DS went even further. The gadget has an additional front camera that constantly monitors the position of the user's eyes relative to the screen and shifts the image relative to the parallax lattice when the head is displaced. Due to this improvement, the 3D effect has become more stable. But, again, this approach is appropriate in the case of small devices. And what to do with the huge screen of the cinema, which hundreds of people watch from different points at the same time?

In MIT, this problem was solved in its own way. Based on the fact that viewers in the cinema halls rarely move from place to place, the researchers decided to improve the design of the parallax barrier. The new technology is called Cinema 3D, and its essence lies in the fact that from the screen a three-dimensional image will be projected onto each individual chair in the cinema hall. Developers assembled a small prototype of the future screen, using in its design a complex system of lenses and mirrors, and even tried it in action. You can see how it all works in the official video below.

At the moment, MIT experts are considering the possibility of creating a full-scale screen for the cinema. Will such a design be feasible in financial terms, or will the owners of large film networks be more profitable to provide their viewers with traditional 3D glasses - time will tell.

The article is based on materials https://hi-news.ru/entertainment/izobretyon-ekran-dlya-kinoteatrov-ne-trebuyushhij-ochkov-dlya-prosmotra-3d-filmov.html.