Apple Jumps Aboard the 3D Bandwagon with New Patent

FFS, Apple. FFS. Just as I – and, perhaps, many of you – thought that this whole 3D ballyhoo was coming to its logical conclusion (invariable failure – one that we would fondly look back on, cheeks flushed, and equate with things like flat-top haircuts, or Pogs), it seems that Apple has decided it isn’t so, filing a new patent that would bring glasses-free 3D to… some device, or something. This isn’t your daddy’s glasses-free 3D – and by ‘daddy’, I mean ‘Sharp’. Apple’s design is space-age as tits, using all manner of techno-sorcery to fill your eyes with Z-axis. Perhaps The Register explains it most poignantly, so I’ll just let them do it.

Apple’s solution, simply put, is to first track viewers’ position and movement, and then use that information to guide the projection of pixels onto “a projection screen having a predetermined angularly-responsive reflective surface function.” In other words, each projected pixel would be beamed onto a textured, reflective screen in such a way as to reflect into the eyes of each viewer at angles that separate the image into left and right views, thus producing a 3D effect.

So the system is keeping track of your eyes, and dynamically adjusting the angle at which light bounces off the screen into each of them. I didn’t even know we had technology that exact yet – if this is doable, that Kinect nonsense is suddenly seeming quite a bit like a pile of crap, no? Of course, even if this was a thing, what’s Jobs going to use it for, anyway? We’ll probably be driving neutrino-powered hover cars by the time this sees the consumer market. Either way, it’s pretty cool. If it works.