Before we even get started here, I'll start with a disclaimer: I don't think 3D TVs are coming back to the home any time soon. However, after a couple of demos at CES of a new kind of seamless glasses-free 3D viewing on TVs – and this coming just a few weeks after seeing Avatar: Fire and Ash – I now think they should come back.
There were two notable examples at CES: one from Visual Semiconductor and one from TCL, which always has a cool range of next-gen display concepts at CES. It looks like both are based on the same tech as well: plenoptic displays, also known as light field displays.
I saw Visual Semiconductor's ‘GF3D' display first, which it's really touting as a huge deal. “From black–and–white to color. From flat 2D to GF3D” is the slogan, so they're not exactly keeping expectations low.
The company emphasized to me that GF3D is different from existing 3D tech — and that makes sense, given that the company says it's based on plenoptic technology.
It's more complicated in movie theaters or on a TV, where you have to somehow steer separate images to each eye from one screen. The glasses you get in movie theaters use polarized lenses to block out certain kinds of light – the projector basically beams out alternating images for each eye, but with a difference in the projection that enables the glasses to filter only the correct frame to the correct eye.
Existing glasses-free 3D TV tech (and the Nintendo 3DS) mostly uses lenticular lensing on the panel, which means that tiny lenses on the screen surface steer some light to the left and some light to the right – so if you stand in the (usually very small) sweet spot where the light…