Introduction To Lenticular Lenses With Lenticular Viewing

After the release of some major motion pictures like Avatar, UP, Alice in Wonderland and so on, the whole movie industry has been turned on by the 3D effect. Due to this boom in the 3D movie world, major TV manufacturers have also started developing 3D TV’s for home viewing. There are mainly three basic methods that are developed to produce a 3D image on an LCD TV. But their production had been refined as some methods are more costly than the others. At the same time, the costlier ones turn out to be the more feasible ones and also user friendly.

The first thing that comes to our mind is the use of 3D glasses for viewing a 3-Dimensional movie. The use of glasses for watching movie in a TV is can be again cut down to two types of technologies namely Passive glass system and Active Glass system.

Here we are going to discuss a new type of technology where we can view 3D movies with the same effect, and that too without the use of glasses. This is called lenticular viewing.

Lenticular Viewing

This method involves the use of lenticules, which are actually very tiny cylindrical plastic lenses. These lenticules are then attached on to a transparent sheet in an array, and then stuck on to the LCD TV screen. Thus when a person views the screen, different images is received by the left and the right eye. That is, the images received by your left eye will be completely different from that received by the right eye. These different 2D images seen by your both eyes will be combined to a single 3D image by your brain. This method is actually called stereopsis, in which the eyes discern the depth).Thus, like other methods, there is no need of the use of 3D glasses for watching a movie.

The detailed figure that shows the actual working of a lenticular lens is shown below.

Lenticular Lens

This method can be easily tried and experimented at home. All you have to do is take a magazine, roll it to a cylindrical shape and view through it with your one eye, keeping te other eye closed. First see through your right eye, then your left eye. While viewing through one eye keep the other one closed. You will notice that by viewing through different angles you are actually viewing different images. That is, from your left eye, you get to see more pictures and text that is on the extreme left side. From your right eye, you see more pictures and text that is on the extreme right side. When both these images are combined, you get a full depth image in the brain.

Disadvantages

• The developers of this technology have to create special type of images for the effect to work. The two sets of images must be joined together. Thus, if a person, views such a video in a normal LCD TV, he would only be able to see blurry double images.
• Some people may not be able to cope up with the lenticular display for long. They feel a kind of motion sickness after watching the display for a long time. This is because the eyes are given extra work to focus and also converge the image.

• This method is less popular than the other two autostereoscopic methods.

• The production of such a 3D TV will also be costly.

• For viewing images using such a technology, you are bound to sit in a “sweet spot” for getting the correct 3D effect. Even a little bend away from the angle will cause the images to be blurred. Thus only 2 or 3 people can easily watch TV comfortably due to the small angle for viewing.

• Though the above problem can be easily avoided to a certain extent by increasing the number of lenticules and also the refresh rate of the screen, the increasing expense will cause problems.