MIT Fiber Points To Woven Glasses-Free 3D Displays 52
MrSeb writes "Electrical engineers and material scientists at MIT have created a fiber-borne laser that could be woven to form a flexible display that could project different 3D images in any number of directions, to any number of viewers. MIT's fiber is similar to standard telecoms fiber, but it has a tiny droplet of fluid embedded in the core. When laser light hits the fluid, it scatters, effectively creating a 360-degree laser beam. The core is then surrounded by layers of liquid crystal, which can be controlled like 'pixels,' allowing the laser light to escape from specific points anywhere along the length of the fiber. This means that you could have a display that shows one picture on the 'front' and another on the 'back' — or different, glasses-free 3D images for everyone sitting in front and behind. In the short term, the laser fiber is more likely to have a significant application in photodynamic therapy, an area of medicine where drugs are activated using light. Photodynamic therapy is one of the only ways to treat cancer in a relatively non-invasive and non-toxic manner. MIT's laser could be threaded into almost any part of the body, where the ability to produce pixels of laser light at any point along its length would make it a highly accurate device."
Re:No headache? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's still going to suffer the problem whereby your focal plane and triangulation point (Is there a word for where both eyes' 'beams' are pointing to? Sorry for the lame words.) are in the same place, despite the images logically appearing in front of and behind that plane as far as your brain can tell.
I reckon it's this disconnect between what you are seeing and what your eyes are doing that causes the headaches & strain.
Re:No headache? (Score:4, Insightful)
You may lose one tool, but cinematography will adapt. There are tons of people who complained about how adding sound to movies would ruin things, and then later adding color, and then going digital. None of those things ruined movies. Things adapted. New techniques were created. The same things will happen with 3d.