HOME THEATER GEEKS PODCAST

MIT postdoc researcher Gordon Wetzstein and Ph.D. student Matt Hirsch explain a new glasses-free 3D flat-panel technology they are working on at the MIT Media Lab. Conventional stereoscopic displays show two views (left and right eye) in a narrow viewing area, and all viewers see the same perspective. The new display shows many perspectives across a wider area, providing each viewer with a different perspective, much like a hologram. The new display combines several LCD layers, directional backlighting, and sophisticated processing to achieve its remarkable result. This isn't going to be a commercial product any time soon, but it does point the way toward a more realistic 3D display without needing those annoying glasses.

Run Time: 55:22

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Gordon Wetzstein is a postdoctoral researcher at the MIT Media Lab. His research interests include light-field and high-dynamic-range displays, projector-camera systems, computational optics, computational photography, computer vision, computer graphics, and augmented reality. Gordon received a Diplom in Media System Science with Honors from the Bauhaus-University Weimar in 2006 and a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of British Columbia in 2011. His doctoral dissertation focuses on computational light modulation for image acquisition and display. He organized the IEEE CVPR 2012 Workshop on Computational Cameras and Displays and won a best paper award for “Hand-Held Schlieren Photography with Light Field Probes” at ICCP 2011, introducing light field probes as computational displays for computer vision and fluid mechanics applications.

Matt Hirsch is a Ph.D. student at the MIT Media Lab. He works with Henry Holtzman's Information Ecology Group and Ramesh Raskar's Camera Culture Group, making the next generation of interactive and glasses-free 3D displays. Matt graduated from Tufts University in 2004 with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering and worked from 2004 to 2007 at Analogic Corp. as an Imaging Engineer, where he designed threat-detection algorithms for Computed Tomography security scanners.

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