The biggest problem about 3D TV is the glasses you have to wear. What if you could see 3D without glasses? A Dutch company called Dimenco has a solution called “auto-stereoscopic displays”. It’s a tricky business. The 3D effect is accomplished by sending different images to each eye. That means, for starters, you’ll need twice as much data to get a good clear picture, because it’s really two pictures. If you aren’t going to use glasses to filter a separate image for each eye, you need a special lens on the TV to do it. And for the lens to work, the viewer has to be in a specific position. A company called Hisense has a TV with “facial tracking” software so that the sweet spot can follow you as you move around the room. The big consumer brands like Samsung, Toshiba and Sony (not to mention Nintendo) have also been dabbling in glasses-free 3D. The biggest problems are a general fuzziness, shallowness of depth and the fact that if you move your head a little bit off axis you lose the effect.
“3D Gives Me A Headache”
The new 4K or Ultra High Definition TV’s, with twice as many pixels as hi-def, solve the problem of detail with two images. The “sweet spot” issue can be a deal breaker. With some displays you temporarily lose the image when you move your head just a little bit and see the wrong angle of the lens. That can potentially be quite a strain.
As quoted on a British web site called 3D Focus, the CEO of a Philadelphia-based company called Stream TV Networks claims to have created an algorithm that mimics the way our eyes actually work. “We use motion to produce the 3D and that is a lot easier to watch, says Mathu Rajan, “There are no headaches, dizziness or blurriness. You can watch it for hours and hours”. The same company boasts a product they call See Cube, which realistically converts 2D to 3D.
Before long we’ll be able to watch high definition 3D video on our big flat screens, for movies or sports events. The entertainment industry has been trying to develop acceptable 3D since movies began and it has never found a technology that caught on. If we don’t need special glasses and don’t get headaches, will the public at last get into watching 3D?