- Samsung has joint-developed a nano-material to create a 3D/2D switching light-field display
- Glasses-free 3D with wide viewing angles and very high resolution
- Likely to appear in phones, tablets and commercial displays first
Are 3D TVs coming back? Not anytime soon, but a new kind of 3D display tech is still quite exciting, and Samsung has teamed up with Korean private research university POSTECH to make a breakthrough. It's developed a way of switching between very high-resolution 2D and realistic, glasses-free 3D.
We've seen glasses-free 3D from both TCL and Visual Semiconductor recently, and they both use plenoptic displays, aka light-field displays. Samsung's version of a light-field screen uses what are described as a "metasurface lenticular lens" layer of "nanoscale structures" to "transition seamlessly between flat (2D) and stereoscopic (3D) images".
This is an important development because as trade site The Elec explains, conventional light-field displays tend to use bulky lenses, deliver narrow viewing angles, have relatively low resolution and can require real-time eye tracking to deliver 3D. Samsung's design addresses these issues.
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What's so special about Samsung's 3D screen tech?
Like other light field displays, Samsung's system transmits light from multiple directions simultaneously to mimic the way light reaches the eye from real objects, which makes it possible to trick the brain to deliver glasses-free 3D. It means there's no limited 'sweet spot' you need to be in to see the 3D effect. But without decent viewing angles for general usage, most displays will still be of limited use. Enter Samsung and its metasurfaces.
Samsung's apparently metasurfaces deliver complex optical functions without the bulk of existing lenses, and Samsung's lens can change its focal properties to deliver either 2D or 3D through a simple change of voltage. According to The Elec, the lens currently delivers viewing angles of up to 100 degrees while only being 1.2mm thick.
That's the good news. The bad news is that you shouldn't expect to have this tech in your home any time soon. Samsung's lens was 25 centimetres square, which is only around a quarter of the size of a smartphone display, let along a TV.
The first commercial applications of the technology are likely to be either small, but that could be fun. Imagine if your iPhone could reproduce your photos in 3D, thanks to the depth maps it already captures in photos? Or the what if the Nintendo Switch 3 actually turns out to be the Switch 3DS, with a return to glasses-free 3D gaming?
It's very possible that actually the first applications will be for big spenders, such as retail and other business displays.
Will the tech make it into TVs? I'm not sure, and I'm speaking as someone who both owned and loved a 3D TV. It seems that every generation has to go through the '3D is the future! / actually no it isn't!' cycle: the 3D cinema boom of the 1950s, the second 3D cinema boom of the early 80s, the Avatar-led 3D cinema and 3D TV boom of the 2010s…
So if that schedule repeats, we're due the next 3D boom in the 2040s. Which gives Samsung plenty of time to perfect its tech.
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