Polarized 3D system
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A polarized 3D system is a method of stereoscopic display in which the left-eye and right-eye images are encoded with different states of polarized light and the viewer wears passive glasses whose two lenses are matching polarizing filters, so that each eye receives only its own image. In their 2016 study of stereoscopic display systems, Baker, Kaestner and Gouws describe the principle: a polarizing filter paired with matching lenses can transmit a separate image to each eye, with the images encoded either linearly (at 0 and 90 degrees) or circularly (clockwise and anticlockwise).[1] The two images can be shown at the same time (two projectors, or alternate pixel rows of one panel) or in rapid alternation through a polarization switch.[1][2]
The method was patented for magic-lantern projection by John Anderton in 1891 and became practical in the 1930s, when Edwin H. Land developed sheet polarizers that could be made in large sizes.[3][4][5] It has since been used in the Natural Vision 3D process of the early 1950s, in digital 3D cinema systems such as RealD, in passive 3D televisions and monitors, and in projection-based and desktop virtual reality systems such as the StarCAVE, CAVE2 and zSpace.[6][7][8] Head-mounted displays do not need it, because they route a separate image to each eye optically.[1]
How it works
Encoding and decoding
Every polarized 3D system has two halves. At the display, a polarizer (the "coding" filter) gives the left-eye image one polarization state and the right-eye image the orthogonal state; at the viewer, the lenses of the glasses act as "decoding" analyzers that pass one state and block the other. Anderton's 1891 design already had this form: two lanterns fitted with polarizers set at right angles to each other, a pair of analyzers, one for each eye, with polarizers also at right angles, and a "non-depolarizing" screen, for which he suggested calico coated with silver or another metal.[3] The two views overlap on the same screen area, and the viewer fuses them into one image with depth through stereopsis.[3][9]
In his review of 3D display technologies, Jason Geng classes polarization-interlaced displays alongside color-interlaced (anaglyph) and time-multiplexed (active shutter) displays among the techniques for separating the two stereo channels shown on one screen.[9] Polarization gives both eyes a full-color image of the same spectrum, which anaglyph filters cannot.[10][7]
Linear and circular polarization
With linear polarization, the two images are polarized at right angles and each lens is a linear polarizer aligned with one of them. Woods notes that linear polarizers must be crossed to block light and parallel to pass it, so their orientation at the display and at the glasses has to match.[2] A RealD patent by Lenny Lipton and Rod Archer, granted in 2009, explains that transmission through a pair of linear polarizers follows Malus's law, varying with the square of the cosine of the angle between their axes, so tilting the head lets part of the wrong image through; it states that "a small amount of head tipping can lead to the loss of the stereoscopic effect when using linear polarizing eyewear".[11] Baker and colleagues likewise list head tilt as a cause of leakage between the channels.[1]
With circular polarization, the images are encoded with opposite handedness (left-circular and right-circular). The same patent explains that a circular polarizer is made up of a linear polarizer and a quarter-wave retarder whose axis is at 45 degrees to the polarizer axis; rotating the retarder axis one way or the other gives the two handednesses.[11] RealD states that circular polarization allows the viewer "to tilt his head without introducing ghosting".[10] Circular polarizers are not insensitive to geometry, however: Woods notes that left-hand and right-hand versions must be matched and that the orientation of their rear linear layer still affects performance, and Baker and colleagues measured that crosstalk through circularly polarized glasses depends on the angle between the screen and the lenses.[2][1]
Screens and light sources
Projected polarized 3D needs a screen that keeps the polarization of the light it reflects or transmits. Geng reports that aluminized surfaces and translucent acrylic screens give good results, while ordinary television rear-projection screens (a Fresnel lens sandwiched with a lenticular sheet) depolarize the light.[9] Cinema systems use "silver" screens for this reason; RealD's 2007 technical overview gives a gain of 2.4 for its silver screen, meaning the screen reflects light preferentially toward the audience.[10] Liquid crystal projectors already emit polarized light from their light valves, and Geng notes that commercial LC projectors can be adapted for stereo by rotating their output polarization with half-wave retardation sheets.[9]
Single-panel displays
A direct-view LCD can carry both images at once if a patterned polarizing layer is bonded in front of it. Woods describes micro-polarized ("micro-pol", "μPol" or "X-Pol") 3D LCD monitors, which polarize odd-numbered pixel rows in one state and even-numbered rows in the opposite state.[2] Sadeg M. Faris filed a United States patent on methods for manufacturing such micropolarizer arrays on 11 June 1990; it was granted on 5 July 1994 and describes arrays that "spatially multiplex and spatially demultiplex" the left and right image elements.[12] In consumer televisions LG Electronics sold the same idea as the film patterned retarder (FPR), a special film placed over the LCD screen.[13] Lim and colleagues note that conventional FPR manufacture uses a photo-alignment coating exposed to UV light through a wire-grid mask, which they describe as expensive and difficult, and they demonstrated an ink-jet printing alternative in 2014.[14] Because each eye sees only alternate rows, this approach halves the resolution delivered to each eye.[13]
Implementations
| Approach | How the two images are separated | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Dual projection | Two projectors, each with its own polarizer (linear or circular), project onto a polarization-preserving screen at the same time[2] | Anderton's 1891 lantern design;[3] the Natural Vision process used for Bwana Devil (1952);[6] the StarCAVE[15] |
| Single projector with polarization switch | One projector alternates left and right frames; a polarization modulator or a circular polarization filter wheel switches the polarization in step[2] | RealD Z screen;[10] DepthQ, NuVision and MasterImage systems[2] |
| Patterned polarizer or retarder on a flat panel | Alternate pixel rows carry opposite polarization states; both images are shown at once at half vertical resolution per eye[2][13] | Micro-pol monitors;[2] LG Cinema 3D televisions;[16] NexCAVE[15] and CAVE2[8] |
| Polarized prints | Back-to-back image pairs with opposite polarization on one substrate[17] | Polaroid Vectograph and StereoJet prints[17] |
History
Early proposals
John Anderton of Birmingham obtained an English patent on 7 July 1891 and a French patent on 8 October 1892 for projecting stereoscopic magic-lantern pictures through crossed polarizers. His United States patent, filed on 5 July 1893 and granted on 9 July 1895, proposed polarizers made from a bundle of thin glass plates, a Nicol prism, a plate of tourmaline "or any other material".[3] In her 2013 keynote history of the field, Vivian Walworth of StereoJet Inc. wrote that superimposed, encoded stereo pairs were envisioned as early as the 1890s, but that polarization encoding only became practical in the 1930s once polarizers were available in large sheets.[4][18]
Land and Polaroid
Edwin H. Land made the first synthetic sheet polarizer: he dipped celluloid into a lacquer containing aligned microscopic crystals, which kept their orientation as the lacquer dried.[5] In 1936 he introduced his polarizing material at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York, an event covered by the New York Times and other newspapers. At the 1939 New York World's Fair, visitors wore Polaroid spectacles to watch In Tune with Tomorrow, a stereoscopic film produced by the Chrysler Corporation that showed a Plymouth car being assembled and was shot with twin cameras; according to Harvard Business School's Baker Library, Polaroid sold more than 1.5 million stereo viewers for the film.[19] Walworth's abstract also describes the Polaroid Vectograph, which printed back-to-back image pairs with opposite polarization; black-and-white Vectographs were used extensively in the Second World War for aerial surveillance and military manuals, and Vectograph targets have long been part of binocular vision testing and training kits.[17]
1950s cinema
Bwana Devil, which opened at the Paramount Theater in Hollywood on 26 November 1952, was shown in the Natural Vision process. LIFE described the process in its issue of 15 December 1952 as using two projectors with Polaroid filters, with the audience given Polaroid spectacles to wear. J. R. Eyerman photographed that opening-night audience for LIFE.[6]
Digital cinema
StereoGraphics Corporation, founded in 1980, developed liquid crystal polarization switches for electronic stereo displays. A patent filed in November 1987 by Lenny Lipton, Arthur Berman, Lawrence D. Meyer and James L. Fergason and granted in December 1988 describes a "push-pull" modulator built from two liquid crystal cells that is driven to transmit right-circularly and left-circularly polarized light in alternate fields, so that a single display can be viewed with passive circular polarizing spectacles.[20][7]
RealD, founded in 2003, acquired StereoGraphics in 2005 and the polarization optics company ColorLink in 2007. It demonstrated its first cinema system to exhibitors and studios in March 2005, and Disney released Chicken Little in 3D on about 100 RealD-enabled screens in November 2005, which RealD's annual report describes as the launch of modern 3D digital projection.[7] RealD's 2007 technical overview describes the system as a single projector with passive circularly polarized glasses. The projector shows left and right images alternately at 144 frames per second, three "flashes" of each 24 frame-per-second frame, and the Z screen, a liquid crystal polarization switch in front of the lens, changes the polarization in sync.[10] The same document gives the light budget: about 50 percent is lost to the duty cycle and another 50 percent to polarization, so the viewer sees about 35 percent of the light of a 2D presentation on a matte white screen even with the high-gain silver screen. RealD also applies a "ghost busting" pre-compensation that predicts leakage and subtracts it from the images.[10] By 31 March 2015 RealD reported its systems on about 26,700 screens in 70 countries.[7]
Passive 3D televisions
LG Electronics introduced its Cinema 3D televisions, based on a film patterned retarder, at CES on 5 January 2011, marketing them with battery-free polarized glasses "similar to the 3D glasses used in theaters".[16] LG's announcement of the Korean launch in February 2011, reproduced by Engadget, gave the glasses' weight as 16 grams and said they contain no electrical parts; Engadget noted that the design halves the resolution delivered to each eye.[13] Consumer 3D television did not last. LG and Sony dropped 3D support from the televisions they launched in 2017, and LG's Tim Alessi told CNET that purchase research showed 3D was "not a top buying consideration".[21] The wider history of the format is covered in 3DTV.
Applications in VR and AR
Projection VR rooms
The original CAVE of 1992 used projector-based stereo on five sides of a 10-foot cube and active shutter glasses.[8] Later CAVE-type systems moved to polarization. The StarCAVE at Calit2, University of California, San Diego, was described in a 2008 university announcement as letting users wear lightweight polarized glasses in place of the battery-powered shutter glasses that first- and second-generation CAVEs required.[22] According to Jurgen Schulze and colleagues, including Thomas A. DeFanti, the StarCAVE is a room-sized system about 10 feet across with 15 rear-projected screens, each driven by two projectors for passive stereo; 18 graphics PCs render to 34 HD projectors of 1920 x 1080 pixels each, and users wear glasses with polarizing filters.[15] The university gave the combined resolution as more than 68 million pixels (34 million per eye) and the cost as less than $1 million.[22]
Flat-panel successors used micropolarized LCDs. The same Calit2 group describes its NexCAVE as the first tiled immersive VR system based on flat panel displays, made from ten 46-inch HD LCDs that use micropolarization so they can be viewed with polarizing glasses.[15] At the University of Illinois Chicago, the Electronic Visualization Laboratory built CAVE2, a cylinder 24 feet in diameter and 8 feet tall made of 72 passive stereo LCD panels, which shows 37 megapixels in stereo or 74 megapixels in 2D.[8] In their 2013 SPIE paper the CAVE2 team, which included Daniel J. Sandin, explain why they chose polarization: autostereoscopic panels lacked resolution and tileability, and synchronizing many active-stereo LCD televisions required costly professional graphics cards, whereas micropolarized panels offered simple construction, thin bezels and good image quality.[8] They describe the micropolarizer as a 0.8 mm overlay of alternating retarder rows separated by black guard bands, whose main drawback is crosstalk in the direction perpendicular to the lines.[8]
Desktop VR and AR
zSpace built its first products around the same idea at desk scale. In its 2024 IPO prospectus, the company states that its original all-in-one and laptop products "used a proprietary passive circular polarized display to create comfortable 3D stereo using lightweight eyewear", and that it is no longer producing those Original Edition products.[23] In Tom's Hardware's 2019 review of the zSpace laptop, the laptop came with a pair of polarized glasses carrying five reflectors and a stylus, both tracked by cameras built into the machine while compatible 3D software is in use.[24]
Relation to head-mounted displays
In a head-mounted display, as in a stereoscope, each eye looks at its own image through its own optics, so no multiplexing on a shared screen is needed.[1] Woods counts stereoscopes and some HMDs among the "zero crosstalk" displays for this reason.[2] Polarization still appears inside modern headsets, but for a different job: the pancake lenses of compact VR headsets are polarization-based folded optics that fold the light path between panel and eye, not a way of separating the stereo pair.[25]
Research
Crosstalk
The main image-quality problem of polarized 3D is crosstalk, the leakage of one eye's image into the other, which viewers see as ghosting.[2] In a 2010 keynote paper, Andrew Woods of Curtin University lists the factors for dual-projector polarized systems: the optical quality of the polarizers, the polarization behavior of the screen (front and rear projection screens differ), and wrong orientation of coding or decoding polarizers. Time-sequential polarized projection adds the phase of the polarization modulator relative to the display and the optical quality of the modulator. For micro-polarized LCDs he adds the alignment and pitch of the polarizer strips relative to the pixel rows, the presence of a black mask between strips (larger viewing zones at the cost of brightness), the thickness of the front glass, the position on the screen, and the viewer's position, since most such monitors are highly sensitive to vertical viewing position.[2]
Measured values show how strongly geometry matters:
| System | Measurement | Reported crosstalk |
|---|---|---|
| DLP projector with DepthQ polarization modulator and passive circular polarized glasses (Baker et al., 2016)[1] | Angle between screen and glasses | About 1% at 0 degrees, 7% at 23 degrees, about 20% at 45 degrees |
| Micropolarized LCD panels evaluated for CAVE2 (Febretti et al., 2013)[8] | Vertical viewing angle, Weissman test pattern | Below 2% up to about +/- 20 degrees, rising steeply beyond that to more than 10% |
The CAVE2 team also gave working thresholds of 2 to 5 percent as very good and 5 to 8 percent as acceptable. To let viewers stand closer to the top and bottom rows of the cylinder, they had custom panels built with the micropolarizer shifted relative to the pixel rows by a target of +/- 9 degrees, so that the line of sight hits the correct row; the authors state that, to their knowledge, the approach had not appeared in earlier literature.[8] Baker and colleagues note that their polarized projection setup contains no active hardware in the scanner room and no metal in the glasses, which makes it usable in MRI research, but that good alignment between the glasses and the screen is important.[1]
Visual comfort
Studies have compared passive polarized displays with active shutter displays. In a crossover study of 30 participants aged 20 to 30, Zhang and colleagues at the Beijing Institute of Ophthalmology found that after watching a video on a shutter-glasses 3D display, measures of accommodation and near-point convergence were significantly worse and the subjective visual fatigue score was significantly higher (1.65 versus 1.20) than after watching on a patterned-retarder polarized display.[26] In an EEG study of 40 subjects, Malik and colleagues reported that 75 percent of participants felt comfortable with passive polarized 3D while 25 percent preferred active shutter technology.[27] Both kinds of glasses-based stereo still present the image on a single screen plane, so neither resolves the vergence-accommodation conflict described by Geng for stereoscopic displays in general.[9]
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 Daniel H. Baker, Milena Kaestner, André D. Gouws (2016). "Measurement of crosstalk in stereoscopic display systems used for vision research". Journal of Vision, vol. 16, no. 15, article 14. doi:10.1167/16.15.14. https://doi.org/10.1167/16.15.14. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
- ↑ 2.00 2.01 2.02 2.03 2.04 2.05 2.06 2.07 2.08 2.09 2.10 2.11 Andrew J. Woods (2010-05). "Understanding Crosstalk in Stereoscopic Displays". 3DSA (Three-Dimensional Systems and Applications) conference, Tokyo, keynote paper. Curtin University. http://cmst.curtin.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2016/05/2010-23_understanding_crosstalk_woods.pdf. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 John Anderton (1895-07-09). "US542321A: Method by which pictures projected upon screens by magic lanterns are seen in relief". Google Patents. United States Patent Office. https://patents.google.com/patent/US542321A/en. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Vivian K. Walworth (2013-03-12). "History of polarized image stereoscopic display". Proceedings of SPIE, vol. 8648, Stereoscopic Displays and Applications XXIV, 864804. doi:10.1117/12.2019134. https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2019134. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 Benjamin Gross (2019-05-07). "Edwin Land - Scientist of the Day". Linda Hall Library. https://www.lindahall.org/about/news/scientist-of-the-day/edwin-land/. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 Ben Cosgrove. "3-D Movies: Revisiting a Classic LIFE Photo of a Rapt Film Audience". LIFE. https://www.life.com/arts-entertainment/3-d-movies-revisiting-a-classic-life-photo-of-a-rapt-film-audience/. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 "RealD Inc. Annual Report (Form 10-K) for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2015". U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. RealD Inc.. 2015. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1327471/000132747115000009/rld-3312015x10xk.htm. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 8.6 8.7 Alessandro Febretti, Arthur Nishimoto, Terrance Thigpen, Jonas Talandis, Lance Long, JD Pirtle, Tom Peterka, Alan Verlo, Maxine Brown, Dana Plepys, Dan Sandin, Luc Renambot, Andrew Johnson, Jason Leigh (2013). "CAVE2: A Hybrid Reality Environment for Immersive Simulation and Information Analysis". Proceedings of SPIE, vol. 8649, The Engineering Reality of Virtual Reality 2013, 864903. doi:10.1117/12.2005484. https://www.evl.uic.edu/documents/spie13paper-final-2.pdf. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 Jason Geng (2013). "Three-dimensional display technologies". Advances in Optics and Photonics, vol. 5, no. 4, pp. 456-535. doi:10.1364/AOP.5.000456. https://doi.org/10.1364/AOP.5.000456. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
- ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 10.5 Matt Cowan (2007-12-05). "REAL D 3D Theatrical System: A Technical Overview". European Digital Cinema Forum. REAL D. https://web.archive.org/web/20120331121206/http://www.edcf.net/edcf_docs/real-d.pdf. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 Lenny Lipton, Rod Archer (2009-04-14). "US7517081B2: Low-cost circular polarizing eyewear". Google Patents. RealD Inc.. https://patents.google.com/patent/US7517081B2/en. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
- ↑ Sadeg M. Faris (1994-07-05). "US5327285A: Methods for manufacturing micropolarizers". Google Patents. https://patents.google.com/patent/US5327285A/en. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
- ↑ 13.0 13.1 13.2 13.3 Richard Lawler (2011-02-16). "LG starts shipping new 'flicker free' 3D TVs with passive glasses". Engadget. https://www.engadget.com/2011-02-16-lg-starts-shipping-new-flicker-free-3d-tvs-with-passive-glasse.html. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
- ↑ Young Jin Lim, Ji Hoon Yu, Ki Hoon Song, Myong-Hoon Lee, Hongwen Ren, Byung-June Mun, Gi-Dong Lee, Seung Hee Lee (2014). "Film patterned retarder for stereoscopic three-dimensional display using ink-jet printing method". Optics Express, vol. 22, no. 19, pp. 22661-22666. doi:10.1364/OE.22.022661. https://doi.org/10.1364/OE.22.022661. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
- ↑ 15.0 15.1 15.2 15.3 Jurgen P. Schulze, Han Suk Kim, Philip Weber, Andrew Prudhomme, Roger E. Bohn, Maurizio Seracini, Thomas A. DeFanti (2011). "Advanced Applications of Virtual Reality". Advances in Computers, vol. 82, pp. 217-260 (Academic Press). http://web.eng.ucsd.edu/~jschulze/publications/Schulze2011.pdf. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
- ↑ 16.0 16.1 "LG Electronics' 'Cinema 3D' Technology Creates Movie Theater Experience at Home". LG Newsroom. LG Electronics. 2011-01-05. https://www.lg.com/global/newsroom/news/media-entertainment-solution/lg-electronics-cinema-3d-technology-creates-movie-theater-experience-at-home/. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
- ↑ 17.0 17.1 17.2 Vivian K. Walworth (2013). "History of polarized image stereoscopic display (Keynote Presentation), abstract". IS&T/SPIE Electronic Imaging 2013, Stereoscopic Displays and Applications XXIV (published as Proc. SPIE 8648, 864804). Society for Imaging Science and Technology. doi:10.1117/12.2019134. https://www.imaging.org/common/uploaded%20files/pdfs/Conferences/ElectronicImaging/Abstracts/ei13-abstracts-L.pdf. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
- ↑ "Stereoscopic Displays and Applications XXIV: Proceedings Preface". Stereoscopic Displays and Applications conference. 2013. http://www.stereoscopic.org/2013/preface.html. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
- ↑ "Commercialization of the Polarizer - Edwin H. Land and Polaroid". Baker Library, Harvard Business School. Harvard Business School. https://www.library.hbs.edu/hc/polaroid/a-research-and-manufacturing-company/commercialization-of-the-polarizer/. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
- ↑ Lenny Lipton, Arthur Berman, Lawrence D. Meyer, James L. Fergason (1988-12-20). "US4792850A: Method and system employing a push-pull liquid crystal modulator". Google Patents. StereoGraphics Corporation. https://patents.google.com/patent/US4792850A/en. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
- ↑ John Biggs (2017-01-25). "3D TVs are dead". TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/25/3d-tvs-are-dead. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
- ↑ 22.0 22.1 "3D Virtual Reality Environment Developed at UC San Diego Helps Scientists Innovate". Phys.org. University of California, San Diego. 2008-09-18. https://phys.org/news/2008-09-3d-virtual-reality-environment-uc.html. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
- ↑ "zSpace, Inc. Prospectus (Form 424B4)". U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. zSpace, Inc.. 2024-12-04. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1637147/000110465924125986/tm244059-38_424b4.htm. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
- ↑ Scharon Harding (2019-05-19). "zSpace Review: This Is What an AR Laptop Can Do". Tom's Hardware. https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/zspace-vr-laptop-education,6129.html. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
- ↑ Xiong J, Hsiang E-L, He Z, Zhan T, Wu S-T (2021). "Augmented reality and virtual reality displays: emerging technologies and future perspectives". Light: Science & Applications, vol. 10, article 216. doi:10.1038/s41377-021-00658-8. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41377-021-00658-8. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
- ↑ Zhang L, Zhang YQ, Zhang JS, Xu L, Jonas JB (2013). "Visual fatigue and discomfort after stereoscopic display viewing". Acta Ophthalmologica, vol. 91, no. 2, pp. e149-e153. doi:10.1111/aos.12006. https://doi.org/10.1111/aos.12006. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
- ↑ Malik AS, Khairuddin RN, Amin HU, Smith ML, Kamel N, Abdullah JM, Fawzy SM, Shim S (2015). "EEG based evaluation of stereoscopic 3D displays for viewer discomfort". BioMedical Engineering OnLine, vol. 14, article 21. doi:10.1186/s12938-015-0006-8. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12938-015-0006-8. Retrieved 2026-10-06.