A New Autostereoscopic Patent by 3M

3M Innovative Properties, Saint Paul, MN, USA, has been assigned patent # 8,179,362 for a "stereoscopic 3D liquid crystal display apparatus with scanning backlight". The full patent text is completely unreadable by mere humans (try here if you dare) but it describes a kind of LCD with two light sources placed behind an LCD panel with a parallax barrier blocking one light or the other when displaying left and right images in a rapid sequence (more or less same stuff as the screen on the back of a Fuji Finepix W3 camera).

^{On the picture above, you can see the left (34) and right (32) LED lamps,
the ligth diffuser (36), the parallax barrier (40), the LDC screen (20).
The eyes of the viewer are in 1a (right eye) and 1b (left eye).}

Innovation

The innovation seems to come from a clever way to switch part of the LCD screen on and off in a sequential way to reduce the ghosting seen in most of the competitor's solutions.

Reading the small abstract of the full text printed here under, we imagine the new patent is focusing on medium size autostereoscopic 3D panels such as those used in laptop computers and tablets.

_{"The computer rendered graphic source can provide gaming content, medical imaging content, computer aided design content, and the like. The computer rendered graphic source can include a graphics processing unit such as, for example, an NvidiaFX5200 graphics card, a Nvidia GeForce 9750 GTX graphics card or, for mobile solutions such as laptop computers, an Nvidia GeForce GO 7900 GS graphics card. The computer rendered graphic source can also incorporate appropriate stereo driver software such as, for example, OpenGL, DirectX, or Nvidia proprietary 3D stereo drivers."}

More info

The patent application was filed on Oct. 2, 2007 (11/865,967). The full-text of the patent can be found here and the images are here. Learn more about 3M Innovative Properties here.