Watch 3-D movies at home, sans glasses

Ever wonder why we wear those pesky 3-

D glasses? Theaters generally either use special polarized light or project a pair of images that create a simulated sense of depth. To actually get the 3-D effect, though, you have to wear glasses, which have proven too inconvenient to create much of a market for 3-D TVs.

But researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) aim to change that with "Home3D," a new system that allows users to watch 3-D movies at home without having to wear special glasses.

Home3D converts traditional 3-D movies from stereo into a format that's compatible with so-called "automultiscopic displays." According to postdoc Petr Kellnhofer, these displays are rapidly improving in resolution and show great potential for home theater systems.

"Automultiscopic displays aren't as popular as they could be because they can't actually play the stereo formats that traditional 3-D movies use in theaters," says Kellnhofer, who was the lead author on a paper about Home3D that he will present at this month's SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference in Los Angeles. "By converting existing 3-D movies to this format, our system helps open the door to bringing 3-D TVs into people's homes."

Home3D can run in real-time on a graphics-processing unit (GPU), meaning it could run on a system such as an Xbox or a PlayStation. The team says that in the future Home3D could take the form of a chip that could be put into TVs or media players such as Google's Chromecast.