A new movie screen under development might one day let moviegoers watch 3-D movies without having to wear special eyewear (often derided as goofy glasses) in a theater equipped with this display.

A team from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) and Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science has demonstrated a small version of a display that lets an audience watch 3-D films in a movie theater without wearing goofy glasses.

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The technology called "Cinema 3D" uses a special array of lenses and mirrors to enable viewers to watch a 3-D movie from any seat in a theater, according to a study. This prototype, however, isn't market-ready as of yet.

"Existing approaches to glasses-free 3-D require screens whose resolution requirements are so enormous that they are completely impractical," said MIT professor Wojciech Matusik, one of the co-authors. "This is the first technical approach that allows for glasses-free 3D on a large scale."

Researchers are optimistic future versions will enable theaters to offer glasses-free alternatives for 3-D movies. Glasses-free 3-D already exists, but can't be used in movie theaters.

The key insight with Cinema 3D is that people in movie theaters move their heads only over a very small range of angles limited by the width of their seat. Thus, it's enough to display a narrow range of angles and replicate it to all seats in the theater.

What Cinema 3D does is to encode multiple parallax barriers in one display so each viewer sees a parallax barrier tailored to his 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.

"With a 3-D TV, you have to account for people moving around to watch from different angles, which means that you have to divide up a limited number of pixels to be projected so that the viewer sees the image from wherever they are," said Gordon Wetzstein, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University not involved in the research.

"The authors (of Cinema 3D) cleverly exploited the fact that theaters have a unique set-up in which every person sits in a more or less fixed position the whole time."

The team demonstrated that their approach allows viewers from different parts of an auditorium to see images at consistently high resolution.

Matusik said the team hopes to build a larger version of the display and to further refine the optics to continue to improve the image resolution.

"It remains to be seen whether the approach is financially feasible enough to scale up to a full-blown theater," he said. "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."

Among the paper's co-authors are MIT research technician Mike Foshey; former CSAIL postdoc Piotr Didyk; and two Weizmann researchers that include professor Anat Levin and PhD student Netalee Efrat, who was first author on the paper. 

Tags3-D movies, 3-D glasses, Cinema 3D, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab