Why 3ality?

What are the problems with existing technologies?

While several competing technologies are already serving business and industry, they’ve had difficulty providing a comfortable top-quality display. For example, Ford Motor Company is using a system based on liquid crystal shutter glasses. Although shutter glasses are the leading stereoscopic solution, users suffer from fatigue and headaches. Flickering of both the display and the room compounds the bulky device’s physical discomfort.

Even those 3D technologies that don’t require glasses (such as Sharp’s and Sanyo’s) do force the user to remain immobilized in a fixed “sweet spot” leading to muscle fatigue, to say nothing of the inconvenience. And those that attempt to deal with the sweet spot by tracking head movements (such as D4D) do so mechanically, with the attendant problems of mechanical delay and failure. Lenticular systems (such as Philips’s) minimize the sweet spot effect by creating discrete, adjacent viewing zones, but slash resolution. Similarly, resolution is seriously compromised by parallax-based solutions (such as those by 4D-Vision, DTI, and Sharp).

The 3ality solution

Traditional approaches provide a 3D stereo pair of images by either sharing the real estate (i.e., dividing up the screen into left- and right-eye zones), thus lowering resolution, or by "time-sharing" – showing first the left-eye then the right-eye image, resulting in flicker. Our new flat-screen approach does neither. Each eye sees its own image on the entire screen at all times. This yields full resolution and no flicker. It's a unique and superior solution.

Among our advantages:

• You see true depth without needing any eyewear – no glasses, no goggles, no wires.
• No flicker. The display doesn’t flicker and neither does the room.
• You can move about freely and the display continues to deliver the correct image to each eye – with no mechanical or moving parts.
• No-compromise resolution. Each eye sees the 3D image with full native resolution.
• A simpler version provides the above benefits using lightweight passive polarizing glasses for both flat-panel displays and projection.

We have presented papers (to much acclaim) describing our technology at the most recent (2002, 2003, and 2004) Stereoscopic Displays & Applications conferences. Many recognized experts in 3D imaging have reviewed and praised our work. The US Army and NuVision Technologies (MacNaughton, Inc.) have teamed up with 3ality to help bring our technology to fruition.