MIT Aims to Eliminate Glasses for 3D Viewing

While the buzz surrounding 3D in the home continues to gain momentum, proponents of the technology have begrudgingly had to admit that the use of 3D glasses is a big hurdle to overcome.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are joining many in the video manufacturing community that are working on a 3D video solution that eliminates the need for glasses, which could ultimately help the format to prosper in the mainstream.

Tgdaily.com reports the school has developed a solution it calls HR3D, which is said to be a new approach that expands 3D's field of view to support large-screen applications with multiple users.

In the story Tgdaily.com says that MIT started with a design concept that, in the real-world application, when viewers move around an object their perspective changes as they move -- which means the 3D experience changes as they move.

MIT's solution to the problem employs two layers of liquid-crystal displays that are configured to have the top-layer LCD panel show a pattern that's customized to the image beneath it.

In theory, Tgdaily.com says, the customized pattern should end up looking like the source image with thousands of tiny slits that follow the silhouette of the objects within the original image.

Peers in the engineering world say the design is unique and a legitimate way to reproduce 3D without using glasses. "The great thing about [Ramesh Raskar's] group (Raskar is head of the MIT Media Lab's Camera Culture research group) is that they think of things that no one else has thought of, and then demonstrate that they can actually be done," says Neil Dodgson, professor of graphics and imaging at the University of Cambridge. "It's quite a clever idea they've got here."