Toshiba squeezes 3D images onto flat display

Toshiba today claimed an imaging breakthrough with the development of technology that allows 3-D images to be viewed on a flatbed display without the need for special glasses.

Viewing the display from an angle allows the viewer to experience 3-D images that appear to stand out several centimetres from the surface of the display.

According to the electronics giant, the technology opens up several areas of application for 3-D displays, including arcade games, e-learning, simulations of buildings and landscapes, and even 3-D menus in restaurants.

3-D displays that do not require aids such as glasses work by projecting slightly different images to each eye, a form of visual stereo. The displays consist of micro-lenses that control the direction of light emission, and supporting software that creates the images.

However, mainstream 3-D technology is limited in terms of the viewing angle at which it can display images, and the images are tiring to view.

Toshiba said that its displays employ an integral imaging system that reproduces light beams similar to those produced by a real object, not its visual representation.

This technique is designed to overcome the main problem with a flatbed display: distance. The difference in the distance from the eye to the centre of a display, and from the eye to the display's edges and corners, is greater for a flatbed than for a standard upright display.

In seeking to reproduce natural 3-D images on the flatbed display, Toshiba developed proprietary software that uses 10 or more views of an object (the current prototype takes 12 or 16), and which processes and reproduces the images in 3-D with a wide viewing angle.

Toshiba explained it has also developed middleware and dedicated circuitry that supports fast playback of the images with only a graphics card.

The company has applied the display technology to 24in and 15.4in displays with 480 x 300 pixels, a resolution 1.5 times that found in the company's conventional 3-D displays, allowing viewers to see high quality stereoscopic images.

Toshiba is already working to refine the technology to include integration of touch-screen controls, and expects to create commercially available products within two years.