• Question: How do 3D TVs where you dont need to wear glasses for work?

    Asked by timp to James, Marcus, Martin, Rob, Suzanne on 16 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Martin Zaltz Austwick

      Martin Zaltz Austwick answered on 16 Mar 2012:

      One of the ways is to angle a different image at each eye. When you put the two together, it looks 3D. I think this is what the Nintendo 3DS does – but it’s harder to do this for TVs because people view them from different angles and aren’t always the same distance away…

    • Photo: Robert Thompson

      Robert Thompson answered on 16 Mar 2012:

      Yes Martin is right. To create a 3D view you need to see a slightly different image in each eye, with the Nintendo 3DS this is easy as the viewer is in a well defined area. With TV’s it is a lot harder unless you sit in a specific place in front of the TV. One way people at my uni are looking at doing it is having lasers which track your movement (a bit like Xbox Kinect) the TV will then know where you are and can project the images at the correct area.

    • Photo: Marcus Gallagher-Jones

      Marcus Gallagher-Jones answered on 18 Mar 2012:

      I was wondering how the 3DS worked thats pretty cool.

    • Photo: Suzanne McEndoo

      Suzanne McEndoo answered on 18 Mar 2012:

      Ok, I asked my boyfriend about this and he says…

      Basically the 3D tvs work in the same way as the nintendo DS, but they use cylindrical lenses on the tv screen instead of slices like the DS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenticular_lens). This means that there’s more than one sweet spot (the spot that you sit that gives the best effect). I think there’s some work on detecting where people are sitting so the tv can adjust the sweet spots to suit the viewer.

      One current problem with Glasses Free 3d TV is that the resolution of the 3d image displayed this way is still relatively low so the 3d picture is not as sharp or as detailed as you get with the 3d glasses. To fix this, higher resolution panels need to be used. Current HD tv’s have a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels. Toshiba have started using 4k Tvs ( 4096 × 2048 pixels) to improve the quality of the glasses free 3d.

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