I wear glasses, so I hate putting another pair on over my specs to watch a 3-D flick. The idea of glasses-free 3-D technology is somewhat more appealing, but I’ve seen a few different iterations of it over the years and it always falls flat.
So I was curious but skeptical when MasterImage 3D, whose 3-D offerings include digital 3-D projectors for movie theaters, asked me to check out its take on it. It has built its technology into an Android-running Qualcomm tablet that it first showed off at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February, and it hopes to include the technology in smart phones starting late this year and tablets early next year.
Matt Liszt, MasterImage’s vice president of marketing, predicts it will add $10 to $15 to the cost of a smart phone, and about $30 to the cost of a tablet.
Generally, a parallax barrier—which has a number of slits in it—is placed in front of an LCD to create a glasses-free 3-D effect. To produce its version of the effect, MasterImage uses what it calls a cell-matrix parallax display, which uses groups of cells to form the barrier. The company says its method prevents blurred images and yields brighter colors. It also means you can watch in landscape or portrait mode.
To read more, click here.