Leave the 3D glasses at home with this new cinema screen

If there’s one major annoyance about watching 3D movies at the cinema, it’s that you require 3D glasses to actually watch them. But what if you could leave the glasses behind?

A team from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab and Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science have come up with a cinema screen that doesn’t require 3D spectacles.

The so-called “Cinema 3D” screen makes use of 50 sets of lenses and mirrors to get the job done, allowing viewers to watch the glasses-free 3D action from any seat.

“Existing approaches to glasses-free 3D require screens whose resolution requirements are so enormous that they are completely impractical,” says MIT professor Wojciech Matusik, a co-author of the paper and a related paper.

“This is the first technical approach that allows for glasses-free 3D on a large scale.”

The team exploited the fact that people move their heads in a small range of angles, being limited by their seat. “Thus, it is enough to display images to a narrow range of angles and replicate that to all seats in the theatre,” MIT explained.

The researchers have warned that the prototype isn’t ready for mass market adoption yet, but said that the technology could be theoretically scaled to billboards and in-store advertisements.

“It remains to be seen whether the approach is financially feasible enough to scale up to a full-blown theatre,” says Matusik. “But we are optimistic that this is an important next step in developing glasses-free 3D for large spaces like movie theatres and auditoriums.”