Eyeglass-Free 3-D Movies on the Horizon

Joab Jackson
for National Geographic News

February 6, 2008

Within a few decades movie-goers may be able to watch their favorite flicks in 3-D without the need for glasses, a new study says.

University of Arizona optical sciences professor Nasser Peyghambarian and his colleagues have created what may be the first rewritable 3-D display surface, one in which an image can be replaced with another within a few minutes.

Peyghambarian's team is working to get the time needed to rewrite the surface down to a fraction of a second.

"The ultimate goal would be some sort of 3-D video that doesn't require eyeglasses to view," Peyghambarian said.

The study appears tomorrow in the journal Nature.

Big Advance

Key to this chameleon-like responsiveness is a specially crafted polymer with a refractive index—a measure of how much the speed of light is reduced—that can be changed by an electrical charge.

Through this charge the material's surface assumes the likeness of the image, which then can be illuminated by a set of small lasers underneath the polymer, according to Joseph Perry, a Georgia Institute of Technology chemistry professor who wrote a commentary about the work in Nature.

"We've been able to record really good holograms, but the problem is we just can't update them. That's what the big advance is here," Perry said.

Objects in a hologram jump out at the viewer in a way they wouldn't with regular photographs, thanks to how the image incorporates multiple views of its subject.

"When you look at a glass of water from different angles, those are called different perspectives," lead author Peyghambarian explained. A hologram can fold these perspectives onto a flat display surface.

Of course, hologram surfaces are nothing new—your credit card may even have a holographic stamp.

In the past few years, though, scientific interest in the technology has rekindled, particularly around the goal of holographic video, said V. Michael Bove, Jr., director of the CELab, a consumer electronics research program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab.

Due in part to computer-game developers eager to make their creations look more realistic, there is no shortage of 3-D content.

(Related news: "Second Life," Other Virtual Worlds Reshaping Human Interaction" [October 17, 2006].)

"The remaining piece is the display technology," said Bove, who heads up a project to produce a display for 3-D video using off-the-shelf electronic components.

So far Peyghambarian's team has produced a four-by-four-inch (ten-by-ten-centimeter) prototype display. They are now working to enlarge this canvas, as well as to shorten the amount of time it takes to erase one image and write in another.

Other Applications

While glasses-free 3-D movies may be a few decades off, other applications using this technology could be only a few years away.

New kinds of endoscopes may record a patient's internal organs in 3-D, allowing physicians a deeper view within the body.

(Related news: "4-D Ultrasound Gives Video View of Fetuses in the Womb" [February 25, 2005].)

Military officers could also use large rewritable 3-D displays to help plan missions, said Charles Lee, a program manager at the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, which funded some of the team's work.

An officer could examine a large image of the battlefield from multiple angles and communicate with fellow planners without having to wear a bulky headset, Lee said.

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