August 16, 2011, Emerging Display Technologies Conference, San Jose, CA—We talked with Matt Liszt from MasterImage3D about their autostereoscopic technology for LCDs. They've made some changes to some base parallax barrier technologies which provide sharp, bright, 3-D images, without the problems of lenticular displays.

Their auto stereoscopic display technology allows direct viewing of 3-D content on flat screen displays without glasses. Their product is based on a parallax barrier, but instead of using full height stripes, they've broken the shutter into multiple cells. This arrangement lets them operate in both portrait and landscape modes as well as switch between 2-D and 3-D displays. The resulting display exhibits brightness and resolution similar to the raw display without the shutter.

Their product technology was first used in a 3-D phone from Hitachi in 2009. Since then, the rapidly increasing volume of 3-D content is making 3-D displays a virtual necessity in portable handheld devices, in the growing international 3-D society. As a result, their process is designed to be integrated into an existing display manufacturing line. In the manufacturing process, the distance from the shutter to the display is set, which establishes the nominal viewing distance and viewing angle for that display. Once the alignment is set, the shutter is permanently UV bonded to the display.

Current designs are for screens up to 4 inches on a diagonal. The next generation will include screens up to 7-inch diagonal which should be released by the end of the year. After that, they plan to release a 10.1-inch screen shutter for the large tablet applications.