Monday 15 February 2010

3D images without glasses

The other day I saw a demonstration of a technique to make 3D images without glasses. The advantage extends even further, though: not only do you not need glasses, but you don't need a special monitor/TV either. So right away I wondered whether this technique of wiggling the images back and forth could be applied to movies too.

My guess is that it wouldn't work too well at the 120ms speed demonstrated in the linked page, but maybe there's another option. Your eyes make these little movements called saccades, which are an integral part of vision. Perhaps, I think to myself, wiggling moving pictures as fast as saccades could fool our brains into seeing depth in a flat image, whether it's still or a movie. If that were the case, we wouldn't need to wear glasses for 3D movies, nor would we need to replace all our LCD and plasma TVs for 3D-capable models. We wouldn't even need special 3D Blu-Ray specifications, unless the frame rate needs to be much higher for saccade-3D.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Keep in mind that I am, in every way possible, not a neuroscientist.
PPS - So this may be complete nonsense. Also, saccades are very fast.

5 comments:

Erin Marie said...

YOU ARE!

Brown said...

Yo- Found your blog on a random flick through and thought it was worth looking at. Nice view on the old 3D there- if they did find a way to trick our eyes without the need for all this fancy stuff then 3D may have a chance- either that or cause massive haemorrhages. A small price to pay some may say...those who really couldn't imagine seeing Avatar in 2d for example! Good work.

John said...

I hadn't considered that this might cause, say, aneurysms or seizures. That would be a terrible thing to find out after all the development and research. I wonder if they'd still go to market, but with warnings that some people may experience motion sickness or something.

Stu said...

http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2010/02/how-3d-works-a-simple-picture-guide/

As it says, how 3d works, even shows how it can be done without glasses

John said...

Interesting that last one with the parallax barrier. Does it work with two or more people or a screen as large as at the cinema? It seems like it might need to be shaped differently and targeted to one viewpoint.