OLED 3D TV Without Glasses Coming Soon?

German manufacturer Sterrix has announced plans to produce a 3D TV that won't require viewers to wear glasses but will be able to produce an unprecedented amount of detail.  The system uses a hundred different perspectives, which, it's claimed, produces an excellent quality picture with no jerkiness.

Several sites have recently picked up on the firm's press release from February, but we missed it back then too.

A hundred different viewpoints with stereoscopic 3D?  At first, that sounds pretty unrealistic.  Who is going to shoot a film with a hundred cameras?!  The only possible exception is an animation, where, in theory, you could calculate the hundred different viewpoints, providing, of course you had enough space to store all of the data that would be generated for every frame.

A dedicated processor for on-the-fly conversion

Sterrix, though, has an answer to this problem: its system includes a processor that interpolates the missing viewpoints, converting a feed on the fly.

Software solutions always make us a little nervous, although that hasn't stopped them working their way into so many products over the years that you often don't even realise they're there.  Your 10 Megapixel photos, for instance, are generally captured by ten million photo-sensitive pixels, each of which is made up of individual red, green and blue cells—so you only really have 3.3 Megapixels.  Another example is provided by TVs with 100 Hz and 200 Hz filters that now produce much sharper pictures with much less ghosting than any 50 Hz television could manage.  The technology has taken a while to mature, though, and the earliest 100 Hz TVs were dreadful, with lots of visual artefacts.  More recently still, engineers have been struggling with on-the-fly conversion from 2D to 3D, but over time, things get better.  At the end of the day, the improvements are usually worth waiting way ...

The new system claims to be backwards-compatible, working with existing Blu-ray 3D discs.  Sterrix claims that there are no problems based on where you're looking at the screen, unlike other auto-stereoscopic displays where objects appear to move unnaturally as you move in relation to the screen.  The matrix, meanwhile, will be invisible from a 'reasonable' distance of 70-80 cm and there won't be any loss in detail when viewing in 2D, which will still be visible in HD.

The firm's press release reports ongoing negotiations with manufacturers to exploit this invention.

One last thing: OLED?!?!

Sterrix's announcement certainly sounds good—but is it realistic?  We were wondering that even before we realised it was based on an OLED screen.  So where did it come from?  There are only a few prototypes in existence all over the world.  Samsung and LG show off the same ones pretty much every year, with only a few visual tweaks.  And even they have expressed doubts about launching the technology soon given how expensive and technically difficult it us.


So how can this German company claim to be ready to produce OLED-based 3D TVs that will work without glasses already?  We're afraid that we think that this is an over-hasty marketing operation.  The press release seems to have been written to appeal to what tech fans and journalists are all desperate for, ensuring some positive coverage all over the press, no doubt in the hope of attracting some investment.  Sterrix's site only has four pages, including one, of course, that invites potential investors to get in touch.

At least the press release helps give us an idea of what might be coming next in the wonderful world of 3D by describing an interesting concept if it doesn't quite offer a realistic solution ...


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