Kar Han Tan

A new advance by Hewlett Packard researchers

announced this week in Nature , could put 3D video in the palm of your hand within the next few years. The new tech is an autostereoscopic multiview 3D display. In English, that's glasses-free 3D imaging you can see from any angle.

Three-dimensional viewing works by making each eye see an image from a slightly different perspective, as we do when viewing real-life objects. Glasses make this easy, as they can filter out two simultaneously projected images so that each eye sees only one. But glasses-free 3D has been a goal of TV and mobile developers for a while now, because wearing 3D glasses at home is annoying, and relying on glasses to view 3D images on your tablet or cellphone would be downright ridiculous.

Current or glasses-free tech works by projecting two images in different directions—as opposed to 2D screens, which have pixels that send light in all directions at once. The problem with this is that the viewer needs to stand within a strict viewing field. If the viewer's nose isn't precisely where it needs to be, his or her eyes won't pick up the right images.

David Fattal, the HP researcher in charge of the project, believes HP's new display—which uses a multiview backlight to scatter light in precise directions, allowing for as many as 64 perspectives of the image—will be the next big thing in 3D tech.

"Unlike a lot of tech out there," he says, "this makes 3D images for the full parallax, meaning you can move your head in any direction and any angle and still see 3D—just like [looking at] Princess Leia's hologram."

Essentially, in a 64-bit display, the backlight produces 64 2D displays that merge together, each independently rendering images to suit one perspective in the 180-degree viewing field. HP actually demonstrated up to 200 views, but 64 is a balance between spatial resolution (the pixel size is comparable with that in a laptop) and the size of pixels in a liquid-crystal display. The team is looking for alternatives to liquid crystals, as smaller pixels will allow them to have more images in the display. However, Fattal says he "can't discuss it, because [he is] hoping you can read about it soon in another Nature paper."

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The backlight is small enough to fit in mobile devices, and while it isn't great for TVs—you need to be within a meter of the backlight to see the image—Fattal believes that this ability to produce the illusion of continuous 3D animation as you move your position will be well-suited to cellphones, which people tend to move and rotate. Plus, he told PM, "The cherry on the cake is that we can make it completely transparent . . . It looks very cool."

Ray Beausoleil, leader of the Large-Scale Photonics research group that produced the research, hesitated to give an exact timeline for getting the technology on the market—as the research was done at HP, it'll be up to the company to decide how, if at all, to capitalize on the findings.

But Beausoleil says that the backlight is up to the task of producing small, static images right now and that animated 3D renderings for cellphones and tablets are definitely possible, though they'd require "a fairly significant investment and a lot of engineering." The takeaway, he says, is that they've found an alternative approach to 3D displays that they mocked up in only about a year and a half. With any luck, this means 3D displays on your phone and tablet are just around the corner.

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