Over the past three years, members of the MIT team have been designing a screen that provides a viewer with a glasses free, multi-perspective 3D experience (MD3D). While that piece of technology is crucial to realistic 3D, immersive multi-perspective 3D video requires a special projector, and that’s just what researchers have created.
Unlike traditional stereoscopic 3D that you’d see in your local theatre, multi-perspective 3D gives a viewer the ability to see more details in an image as they move about a projection. In that regard MD3D is a much more natural method of conveying visual information and could lend itself to more immersive videos, simulations and information systems.
Using off the shelf parts, the MIT team created a projector that’s based on a pair of liquid crystal modulators. According to an MIT press release, “Patterns of light and dark on the first modulator effectively turn it into a bank of slightly angled light emitters — that is, light passing through it reaches the second modulator only at particular angles. The combinations of the patterns displayed by the two modulators thus ensure that the viewer will see slightly different images from different angles.”
While the MIT 3D system won’t debut until SIGGRAPH later this year, members of the Camera Culture group feel their 3D system is a economically viable solution for the holy grail of visual mediums: multi-perspective holographic displays.
Image and Video Courtesy of MIT