3-D TV without 3-D Glasses

This is definitely the future of 3D. Remember when the first big screen TVs came out? You had to sit directly in front of them to get a good picture. Well, we’re getting back to that again with the new 3D TVs. Since they project two sets of images, the angle is important — however it won’t be long before they fix that. This article is awesome and talks about the capabilities that already exist. Samsung and others are going down the 3D glasses path and I just don’t see how 3D will move into homes if you need glasses. Wired magazine reports:

I entered a conference room in Manhattan and a woman on the TV tossed a handful of rose petals out of the screen, where they floated in the air before my eyes.

At least, that’s what I saw. In truth, the image resided on a perfectly flat, 42-inch LCD screen. But the 3-D illusion was fully believable, and I didn’t have to wear a dorky set of polarizing glasses.

A new line of 3-D televisions by Philips uses the familiar trick of sending slightly different images to the left and right eyes — mimicking our stereoscopic view of the real world. But where old-fashioned 3-D movies rely on the special glasses to block images meant for the other eye, Philips’ WOWvx technology places tiny lenses over each of the millions of red, green and blue sub pixels that make up an LCD or plasma screen. The lenses cause each sub pixel to project light at one of nine angles fanning out in front of the display.

A processor in the TV generates nine slightly different views corresponding to the different angles. From almost any location, a viewer catches a different image in each eye.

Read more here:

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/08/71627