3D display

A 3D display is any display device capable of conveying three-dimensional images to the viewer.

There are few basic types of 3D displays. Stereoscopic technology separately sends two views of a 3D scene on its screen(s) to the viewers two eyes. autostereoscopic 3D displays advance on stereoscopic technology without the need for any special glasses or other head gear by using high resolution flat panels to generate a given number of views of a 3D scene through some sort of pixel redirection technology. This solution gives "ok" quality 3D views from predefined sweet points in front of the display, but leaves a tangled image while in between the sweet points. Continuous 3D light field display developed by Holografika generates a glasses free 3D image with no restrictions on the number of viewers, their position in front of the screen and their movement. Holographic 3D displaying researchers are able to create a light field which is identical to that which emanated from the original scene (for the technology, see Computer Generated Holography). This last technology is capable of reproducing horizontal and vertical parallax at the same time, while stereoscopic and autostereoscopic technologies can create horizontal parallax 3D images only. This may seem a limitation of 3D displays, but the longitudinal location of human eye on the head is in perfect pair with the horizontally multiplied views of these displays.

In addition there are volumetric displays, where some physical mechanism is used to display points of light within a volume. Such displays use voxels instead of pixels. Volumetric displays include multiplanar displays, which have multiple display planes stacked up; and rotating panel displays, where a rotating panel sweeps out a volume.

Other technologies have been developed to project light dots in the air above a device. An infrared laser is focused on the destination in space, generating a small bubble of plasma which emits visible light. Up to now (August 2008) the experiments only allow a rate of 100 dots per second. One of the issues which arise with this 3D display system is the use of technologies that could be harmful to human eyes.