2x3D, developed by the Shirai Lab at Kanagawa Institute of Technology, is a system that lets the same screen be viewed simultaneously by people who want to watch it in 2D and 3D.
Whereas conventional passive 3D systems use polarizing filters for both the left and right eyes, this system uses a special picture-generating algorithm. Pictures for the left eye can be seen with the naked eye and only pictures for the right eye need to be viewed through a polarizing filter.
“Previously, you’d have seen double image, like this. In our system, seeing a double image when you take the glasses off has been eliminated by computing with a real-time GPU.”
“This system has several applications. One that’s easy to understand is multilingual viewing. For example, I’m giving this presentation in Japanese, but the pictures themselves could be in English. What’s important is that everyone looks at the same screen, and the information delivered is different for people who are wearing the glasses and people who aren’t.”
“Regarding the hardware, there are two ordinary projectors used concurrently, almost the same as a 3D set-up. If you project two pictures, usually, you see both pictures, like this. If you pass them through a filter, you can see one picture. As for the other picture, we want to make it like this. Firstly, to cancel the other picture, we superpose, say, a blue picture on the orange parts, to make them white. Then, we combine the canceled parts with the pictures we want to add, and ultimately, we achieve this kind of hidden picture. I said we simply use complementary colors, but it can’t be done that simply. That’s where the technology comes in.”
“Superposing pictures leads to lower contrast. The contrast is halved, and that’s the weak point here. But compared with the shutter method, the picture quality isn’t reduced, nor is the resolution. Regarding color, current cinema projectors support 12-bit, so progress is fast. You can use deep color, or quality can be improved, right away, by using more projectors. So, I think that’s a promising method.”
Source: Akihabaranews.com