A 3-D movie screen prototype is being developed to enable viewers to watch a 3-D film from any seat in a theater. This new technology comes from a team at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, partnered with Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science. In a jointly published paper, the teams demonstrate a display that lets audiences watch 3-D films in a movie theater without extra eyewear.
The notoriously goofy glasses and headsets currently required to view a movie in 3-D might now become a thing of the past. Dubbed “Cinema 3D,” the new screen prototype uses a special array of lenses and mirrors to enable viewers to watch a 3-D movie from any position in a theater.
The creators of this new technology insist that it will be the first of its kind to be implemented on a large scale.
According to MIT professor Wojciech Matusik, “Existing approaches to glasses-free 3-D require screens whose resolution requirements are so enormous that they are completely impractical.” Matusik is one of the co-authors on a related paper (whose first author is Weizmann PhD Netalee Efrat). “This is the first technical approach that allows for glasses-free 3-D on a large scale,” she continues.
The researchers caution that the system isn’t currently market-ready; however, they are optimistic that future versions could push the technology to a place where theaters would be able to offer glasses-free alternatives for 3-D movies. Glasses-free 3-D already exists, but not in a way that scales to movie theaters. Traditional methods for TV sets use a series of slits in front of the screen (a “parallax barrier”) that allows each eye to see a different set of pixels, creating a simulated sense of depth.
However, because parallax barriers have to be at a consistent distance from the viewer, this approach isn’t practical for larger spaces like theaters (that have viewers at different angles and distances).
With Cinema 3D, the key insight is that people in movie theaters move their heads only over a very small range of angles, limited by the width of their seat. Therefore, it is enough to display images to a narrow range of angles and replicate that to all seats in the theater. It then encodes multiple parallax barriers in one display, such that each viewer sees a parallax barrier tailored to their position. That range of views is then replicated across the theater by a series of mirrors and lenses within Cinema 3D’s special optics system.
“It remains to be seen whether the approach is financially feasible enough to scale up to a full-blown theater,” Matusik remarks. “But we are optimistic that this is an important next step in developing glasses-free 3-D for large spaces like movie theaters and auditoriums.”
This work was funded by the Israel Science Foundation and the European Research Council.
