Glasses-free 3D projector

Over the past three years, researchers in the Camera Culture group at the MIT Media Lab have steadily refined a design for a glasses-free, multiperspective, 3D video screen, which they hope could provide a cheaper, more practical alternative to holographic video in the short term.

Now they’ve designed a projector that exploits this technology, which they’ll unveil at this year’s Siggraph, the major conference in computer graphics.

The projector can also improve the resolution and contrast of conventional video, which could make it an attractive transitional technology as content producers gradually learn to harness the potential of multiperspective 3D. Multiperspective 3D differs from the stereoscopic 3D now common in movie theaters in that the depicted objects disclose new perspectives as the viewer moves about them, just as real objects would.