Sony Seeks Patent to Adjust Glasses-Free 3-D Technology

San Diego – According to recent filings with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Sony has applied for a patent for a correction to its existing Glasses-Free 3-D technology.

Industry experts have historically agreed that the success of Autostereoscopic 3-D technology has been dependent on the viewer’s angle and distance from the viewing screen. Sony, one of the leaders in the 3-D television market, was one of the first mainstream companies to release its 3-D technology toward that end in 2010. 3-D television technology that did not require viewing glasses was unveiled not long after that. However, critics quickly noted problems with 3-D display images that included blurring, image distortion and a less than optimal view when the viewer wasn’t lined up to a precise and exact distance and angle.

Past limitations of 3-D technology without glasses were a result of a fixed arrangement of lenses that did not allow for adjustment that would separate the images as needed. Essentially, the viewer was often in the wrong place for viewing the images. In particular, depending on how near or far the viewer was from the screen, the depth of picture could easily be over or under-exaggerated. As a result of these imaging issues, the viewer could end up with headaches or nausea in extreme cases. The new technology proposed by the current Sony patent involves a correction that would enable the device to detect the viewer’s distance from the screen and automatically adjust the separation of images to provide optimal viewing clarity and sharpness of picture.

The new Sony patent includes both the image processing methodology and the corresponding entertainment system for image display. Additionally, Sony’s new technology would shift image elements in either or both the left and right eye images while viewing the Glasses-Free 3-D images. This shift would alter viewing displacements and create a point of intersection of lines of sight between the viewer and his or her image elements. The result would be a depth separation of image elements, creating the same effect as if the viewer had been viewing images at the ideal distance and angle.