Philips ‘Sitting On Golden Egg’ With Glasses-Free 3D, Dutch Startup Says

BERLIN -- Were glasses-free 3D as a business ever to take off, Philips would be “sitting on a golden egg,” said Maarten Tobias, CEO of Dimenco, at the IFA show. Dimenco is the startup company formed by eight former Philips employees who previously worked for 3D Solutions, the Philips-funded incubator project in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, to develop autostereoscopic 3D display panels.

Philips shut down 3D Solutions in mid-2009 because it deemed the company’s 3D panels were too expensive for consumer use. But Philips took pains at the time to remind the world that it was retaining its large folio of patents for licensing glasses-free 3D technology to third parties in the future. Dimenco, also based in Eindhoven, is the first company to take such a license, Tobias said. But the license is not exclusive to Dimenco, he said: “Philips will license others who want to make no-glasses screens."

Tobias said Dimenco has been working to improve on the panels developed by 3D Solutions. It demonstrated the results on a 56-inch screen at the Philips stand at IFA, under the banner, “3D of the Future.” The new 4K panels have double the resolution of the most recent 3D Solutions version, and this lets the screen display 15 graded views ranging from full left to full right behind a lenticular screen with 15 vertical lens slices, Tobias said. This gives viewers far sharper pictures over a wider, 120-degree viewing angle, he said.

Demo material shown on the screen was specially shot as a “2D+ Depth” signal in which a 2D image is accompanied by a bit map that describes the depth of objects in the scene, Dimenco said. Processing in the panel converts 2D+Depth to the required 15 views in real time, on the fly, it said. We were impressed by the quality of the demo material shown on the 4K panel. We also noted that if the viewer’s head was tilted to one side, the image degraded gracefully to 2D with few annoying artifacts.

The next step in Dimenco’s development work will be to convert or “render” on the fly stereoscopic material from a Blu-ray 3D movie to 2D+Depth, Tobias said. It would then be possible to play Blu-ray 3D movies through the display for glasses-free viewing, he said. “Real-time rendering is definitely possible,” he said. “The advantage of using 2D+Depth is that you can give the user control over the depth of the image, which is not possible with existing systems."

Panel cost of the 4K version shown at IFA is still too high for consumers, roughly around 40,000 euros ($51,000) for the 56-inch screen, Tobias said. But the company is working on a 2K 52-inch full HD monitor that could be sold for about 6,000 euros ($7,600), he said. Besides cost, lack of autostereoscopic 3D standards is another market obstacle, Tobias said. “But we expect it will be something the BDA takes on,” he said of the Blu-ray Disc Association. “And 2D+Depth is already in the MPEG and HDMI 1.4 standards,” he said.

Dimenco sees the 4K panels as finding a home in professional uses, such as in digital signage or medical applications, Tobias said. “It’s likely that the first consumer applications will be for photo frames, which are smaller and where the consumer is less sensitive to quality. We expect consumer products in 3-5 years.” Dimenco press releases distributed at IFA quoted Tobias as saying the company thinks that the consumer market as a future step offers many opportunities. “We expect consumers to experience 3D digital photo frames without the need to wear glasses soon,” he said. “For other consumer markets, such as 3D game consoles and 3D TV, this will take a couple of years still to further optimize the technology.”