Gone are the days of wearing clunky glasses for watching 3D movies, well almost. A South Korean optics research team has developed a system which makes glasses-free 3D a reality. Seoul National University conducted the new study, which shows that glasses-free 3D could work on the big screen.

The research team announced that the system can be successfully used in commercial theaters, maintaining the magic of 3D without the glass barrier. However, the promising technology will take several years to be effectively deployed in local movie theaters, informed the researchers.

In the new system, researchers have used a technology called "Venetian blinds" on the screen of the commercial theaters, which prohibits the passage of light after it reflects off the screen. Researchers have added a particular coating to the screen known as a quarter-wave retarding film to block the necessary passage of the light.

They claim that the new technology will use less projector space and will be cheaper than current 3D projection technology.

According to Byoungho Lee, a professor at the School of Electrical Engineering, Seoul National University in South Korea and the lead researcher of the current project, "There has been much progress in the last 10 years in improving the viewers' experience with 3-D."

"We want to take it to the next step with a method that, if validated by further research, might constitute a simple, compact, and cost-effective approach to producing widely available 3-D cinema, while also eliminating the need for wearing polarizing glasses," said Lee.

3D video works on polarized light. Currently, the 3D movies use two projectors and each of the projectors emits only one state of polarized light.

The present experimental method can be used in two types of 3-D displays. First, the parallax barrier method display, wherein a device will be placed in front of the screen to separate the images and allowing each eye to view different, slightly counterbalanced images. The other one is the integral imaging method, in which a two-dimensional set of tiny lenses are used to create the 3D effect.

"Our results confirm the feasibility of this approach, and we believe that this proposed method may be useful for developing the next generation of a glasses-free projection-type 3-D display for commercial theaters," averred Lee.