Ultra-D glasses-free 3D TV review

Amongst the big-hitters at CES every year are some smaller companies with some very good technology. Today we saw Stream TV present a prototype 4K TV with glasses-free 3D and it looked pretty good. We had some reservations, but then we’ve had reservations about glasses-free 3D from big players such as Toshiba too.

All the 3D TV systems you’re likely familiar with use some form of stereoscopic trick – sending different images to each eye to create a 3D illusion. Passive and active glasses do this by blocking a portion of the light going to each eye, while most glasses-free systems track the viewers head and then send the appropriate image to the appropriate eye.

We can’t show it here of course, but some of the demo footage looked pretty good

Ultra-D is a completely different way of doing things, and though the company is unwilling to discuss the exact technical nature of the system, it’s more akin to the holy grail of a holographic display, than it is to stereoscopic systems.

Ultra-D was demonstrated both at a press conference and on the show floor at CES. And it does undeniably work. You get a 3D effect, without glasses, with any number of people watching, and from any angle to the screen (within reason). That’s more than we can say about any competing system we’ve seen.

The effect is still a little rough around the edges admittedly, there’s occasional areas of blurriness and the image seems to shift and blur if you move your head around, but it’s still impressive. It was shown working with movies, games and connected to a 3D camcorder.

The depth of the displays will put off some consumers

The clue in how it works comes from the girth of the displays, now these are only prototypes but w talked to one representative of the company and he said the screens would never be very thin. He went to say that as well as the usual panel there was a refractive layer in the TV – which we presume has to be a certain minimum distance from the panel behind.

This layer must be what is creating the 3D effect. On the screen we saw it was set to be most effective from around 10ft away, though a representative said that could be adjustable in retail sets. Our only other clue is that he made reference to a holographic type of display, but we’re still not clear on exactly how it all works.

It works on both big 4K screens as well as more modest Full HD ones

One thing is for sure, there’s no loss of brightness here and the lack of head tracking means there’s no limit on the number of people watching, or reduction in resolution as the screen has to divide its resources between them.

The bulkier design may put up some consumers, but it could well be a price worth paying for glasses free, headache free 3D TV. We were also assured that the price of the technology would make it competitive and no more expensive than other 4K sets, though that’s not saying much. The company has struck a manufacturing deal with HiSense, who may be new to you, but are the biggest TV manufacturer in mainland China and fifth biggest in the world.

This game worked in 3D but a choppy frame rate didn’t help the demonstration

Seecube are another partner in the venture, and it’s there clever video processing technology that is sued to generate 4K 3D content from HD content such as Blu-ray movies. It’s pretty impressive stuff too, using multiple frames to judge what’s in the foreground and background and then creating the 3D information and upscaling the movie at the same time. The results were the best we’ve seen for such 2D-to-3D conversion.

Here we saw that a standard 3D camcorder can be used with the display

The Ultra-D system is still pretty rough around the edges in terms of image quality and the appearance of the TVs, but it does work and it will be interesting to see if it can make any traction against the big players, who seem to have few practical answers when it comes to providing us with a hassle-free everyday 3D delivery method.