RealD’s Newer 3D Patents Seem to Break New Ground, Our Search Finds

Recent patent filings by RealD seem to break new ground, we found in the latest in a series of reports profiling the patent portfolios of 3D’s leading IP holders. The newer filings complement expiring patents held by RealD (CED March 9 p2).

RealD’s newer filings comprises patents granted or applied for after 2005, when the company acquired 3D pioneer StereoGraphics, with its trove of IP. Although RealD identifies itself as “RealD” for its website, publicity materials and branding, its patent filings use the name “Real D.” This small difference can be enough to cloak the company’s filings from a routine U.S. Patent Office search.

We found 57 granted and pending filings for Real D, many naming the inventor as Lenny Lipton -- the founder of, and driving inventive force behind, StereoGraphics. Lipton left RealD about three years after the takeover and is the president and chief science officer at Oculus3D. That company competes with the RealD digital projection systems by advertising that “the audience doesn’t care if it’s digital, they go to see 3D.” Oculus3D says it offers a 3D attachment for traditional 35-mm film projectors “that’s two to three times brighter than most digital 3D systems,” gives “the brightest 3D on the market” and goes “where no digital projector can go.” In a separate search, we found 24 patent filings by Lipton that don’t name StereoGraphics, RealD or Real D as assignee. We'll analyze these Lipton 3D patents and others in future reports.

Among the 57 Real D filings we found six applications for autosterescopic no-glasses 3D systems that rely on a lenticular screen. Three of the 57 deal with polarization-projection screens and five with polarization-projector lenses. Five others describe designs for active and passive 3D glasses. There also are applications on methods for enhancing 3D images, like selectively blurring parts of the image. Among patents the granted Real D, two cover low-cost glasses, two are for projection screens, six are on lenticular no-glasses systems and nine on polarizing-projection optics and light-pipe light channeling.

Its U.S. applications 2006/0268104 and 2010/0040280 tackle the problem of cross-talk ghosting, in which a bright region of an image intended only for one eye is also seen by the other eye. The solution, called “ghostbusting,” is to add brightness to both eye images. This makes it easier for the producer to identify the ghost and subtract it electronically to “bury the ghost."

Real D’s U.S. application 2010/0026783 lets a screen automatically display a “put your glasses on now” message when the program is about to switch from 2D to 3D. The trigger is an unnatural color bar briefly inserted into the picture shortly before the 2D-3D transition. U.S. 2009/0027772 describes a head-mounted display helmet with single panel that delivers time-sequential 3D to the wearer’s eyes.

U.S. 2007/0206155 acknowledges that field-sequential projection and circular-polarization glasses reduce the light from the projector to 15 percent. Real D’s filing says fine-tuning the modulator in the projection polarizer to the aluminized theater screen can help.

Applications U.S. 2007/7511787, 2008/0239068 and 2008/0239067 describe ways to improve current 3D systems by using a color wheel or sequenced colored LEDs. U.S. 2008/0094528 moves RealD’s interests in the direction of the Dolby Laboratories color-filter 3D system by describing LED backlights for LCD screens with distinct red, green and blue spectra, decoded by viewing glasses.

Applications 2008/0303895 and 0303896 claim “stereoplexing for film and video,” and relate to the quincunx or checkerboard compression system on which Sensio has claimed patent rights (CED Feb 3 p2). Left and right images are squeezed into a standard image frame, side by side or above and below each other, by averaging and removing selected pixels from each image. Before this “pixel-plucking,” Real D subdivides the images into “tiles” for separate processing, with more pixels removed from the outer edges of the picture than from the center. So the middle of the picture, which the viewers’ eyes will concentrate on, are scaled to 65 percent resolution while the less-important side quarters are reduced to 35 percent resolution.

Among patents granted to Real D, U.S 7,489,445 is for a dual-function screen for PCs or TVs. The screen can be used in 2D mode to display high-resolution images, or covered with a lenticular overlay to show no-glasses 3D of lower resolution. The user-removable overlay is manually installed with stainless steel pegs positioned by software that displays reference-image markers on the screen.