IEEE Spectrum December, 2010 - 56

ut Microsoft's struggles are good news for 3M.
Not only has the St. Paul, Minn.-based company managed to get sequential autostereo working well, it's gotten it small enough to fit in the device I'm holding right now.
3M's senior technical manager, Bill Bryan, doesn't mince his
words: "There hasn't been a bigger improvement to the viewing
experience since the introduction of color screens." Of course,
he would say that, wouldn't he? But there's no denying that 3M's
new Vikuiti 3-D technology is something special.
I viewed the Vikuiti 3-D effect on both 3-inch and 9-inch
screens, and I found it to be startlingly bright, crisp, and vivid
when seen head-on. If you do move to one side, the images fade
gracefully into 2-D. At a trade show last May in Seattle, 3M's
LCD business director, Erik Jostes, showed off a 9-inch model.
The company was running a show reel of animated gaming
characters and also some smooth, full-resolution video.
Basically, this is the 3-D display we've been promised in science fiction films for the last 50 years. And an early version
of it, which suffers from slightly more cross talk than the 3M
models, is available today, in Fujifilm's W1 3-D digital camera.
To understand the 3M system, start with the fact that most
LCD screens are transmissive; they have a backlight that
shines through the liquid crystal panel to form an image. In
handheld devices, the backlight LEDs are located at the display's edge to save space. A single row of LEDs constantly
shines into a plastic light guide that, as its name suggests,
directs and disperses light in the correct direction-up and
out of the display. For years, 3M has been creating optical films
that help move this light evenly from the sides into, across,
and out of the liquid crystal panels, increasing their effective
brightness. The company has now come up with the Vikuiti

Hands on: Nintendo
lets gamers get their
hands on autostereo
3-d at the official
launch of its 3ds
handheld system this
past september, in
chiba, Japan. the device
won't hit store shelves
there until February.
Photo: Yoshikazu tsuno/aFP/
GettY imaGes

optical film, which can direct images to one eye or the other.
This autostereo 3-D system has a light guide with a column
of LEDs mounted on either side of the screen; the columns
flash alternately 120 times a second. Each burst of light travels
through the light guide as usual, then up into the Vikuiti optical
film. Inside the film are microscopic bumps-finely engineered
features that act as tiny lenses. When light from the left-side
LEDs shines on them, they direct light to the user's left eye,
and when light shines on them from the right-side LEDs, the
image is directed to the right eye. Flashes of left and right light
are easy enough to produce, but for the screen to form an image,
the LCD panel above the film must be perfectly synchronized
with those flashes, showing only the left image when the leftside LEDs are on and the right image for the right-side LEDs.
The Vikuiti screen has just one 3-D sweet spot, straight out
from the screen. At this point it's definitely intended for personal viewing, not Super Bowl parties.
In order to direct light reliably to each eye at the correct viewing position, 3M needs to manufacture the microscopic lenses-
the bumps-with extreme precision. The film is just 150 micrometers thick (around twice as wide as a human hair), with the

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum December, 2010