3D Display From Cellophane

Using cellophane to convert a liquid crystal display screen into a three dimensional display (3D laptop computer and 3D camera phone)

Keigo lizuka
Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering
35 St. George Street
University of Toronto
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 1A4

Abstract. We present a novel, inexpensive, stereoscopic technique for generating 3D images from cellophane on a liquid crystal displays which are most typically used for a laptop screen or a camera phone screen. Stereoscopy requires independent manipulation of the left and right eye views. 1 Our technique takes advantage of two facts; the first is that the light from the liquid crystal display of either a laptop computer or a camera phone is polarized light 2, and therefore we can easily manipulate its transmission with a polarizer sheet. The second fact is that a cellophane half-waveplate can change the direction of polarization of light. The direction of polarization of one half of the liquid crystal screen was rotated by the cellophane half-waveplate. Two images displayed with orthogonal polarization on two halves of the screen become separable by wearing a pair of glasses of orthogonal polarization. A distinct advantage of our technique is its simplicity; either a laptop screen or a camera phone screen can be converted into a 3D display with minimal knowledge of optics. An additional advantage of our technique is that we can eliminate the need for the observer to wear special glasses by making the screen wear the glasses instead. This is possible because there is normally only one viewer at a time, and the relative orientation of the viewer's head and the screen is sufficiently stationary. A further significant discovery is that we verified that cellophane (costing mere pennies) proved to be a better half-waveplate than a commercial half-waveplate (costing hundreds of dollars for the required size) for rotating the polarization of white light.

Source: http://individual.utoronto.ca/iizuka/research/cellophane.htm