Now watch 3D movies at home without 3D glasses

Everyone has watched 3D movies at least once in their life, but they however have not quite made the jump into home viewing as yet. The main reason is that thing which rests on your nose, and the expensive display tech.

Wearing those pesky 3D glasses in theatres gave headaches alongside the movie. Ever wonder why? Theatres generally use special polarised light or project a pair of images, which creates a simulated sense of depth. To have a sense of 3D effect, one has to wear glasses, which sometimes proves inconvenient and blocks the market for 3D TVs.

Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have aimed to change that with “Home3D,” a new system which allows users to watch 3D movies at home without having to wear any special glasses.

The Home3D converts traditional 3D movies from stereo into a format which is compatible with its “automultiscopic displays.” According to postdoc Petr Kellnhofer, these displays are rapidly improving in resolution and shows great potential for home theatre systems.

“Automultiscopic displays aren’t as popular as they could be because they can’t actually play the stereo formats that traditional 3-D movies use in theatres,” says Kellnhofer, who was the lead author on a paper about Home3D that he will present at this month’s SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference in Los Angeles. “By converting existing 3-D movies to this format, our system helps open the door to bringing 3-D TVs into people’s homes.”

Home3D can be run in real time on a graphics processing unit, which means it could run on a system such as an Xbox or a Playstation. The team has stated that in the future Home3D could take the form of a chip which could be put into TVs or media players such as Google’s Chromecast.
Users can also customise their viewing experience, dialling up and down the desired level of 3D for any given movie.

In a user study, which included clips from movies which included “The Avengers” and “Big Buck Bunny,” participants have rated Home3D as higher quality 60 per cent of the time, as compared to 3D videos converted with other approaches.