3D Visual Communications

9.1 Glass-Less Two-View Systems

The popularity of 3D movies has broken the ice of the 3D industry and pushed 3D technologies into commercial products and applications including 3D movies, 3D videos, 3D games, and 3D augmented surgery systems. It is not convenient for consumers to watch the 3D contents due to the requirement to wear 3D glasses when using commercially available 3D display devices. Therefore, a glass-less two-view 3D system would relieve this inconvenience. The first glass-less two-view 3D technology, the “parallax barrier” technology, was developed by Frederic E. Ives as early as 1901. It is a general belief that the quality and price of glass 3D display devices would be better than that of glass-less 3D display devices because delivering proper visual information to each eye in open space is a very hard problem. Despite of the cost and technical limitations, glass-less display devices can still be used in several 3D applications including 3D mobile smartphones, 3D portable game consoles, and 3D augmented surgery systems. This is because wearing a pair of 3D glasses may distort the view of objects in the world when smartphones and portable game consoles are used in public and not in a private space.

Stereoscopy delivers respective views of the scene to the left eye and right eye on one single display device. A glass-less two-view 3D display system, which is called autostereoscopy, must be able to deliver stereoscopic content to each eye respectively without wearing ...