(Image credit: Future)

Before we even get started here, I’ll start with a disclaimer: I don’t think 3D TVs are coming back to the home any time soon. However, after a couple of demos at CES of a new kind of seamless glasses-free 3D viewing on TVs – and this coming just a few weeks after seeing Avatar: Fire and Ash – I now think they should come back.

There were two notable examples at CES: one from Visual Semiconductor and one from TCL, which always has a cool range of next-gen display concepts at CES. It looks like both are based on the same tech as well: plenoptic displays, also known as light field displays.

I saw Visual Semiconductor’s ‘GF3D’ display first, which it’s really touting as a huge deal. "From black–and–white to color. From flat 2D to GF3D" is the slogan, so they’re not exactly keeping expectations low.

The company emphasized to me that GF3D is different from existing 3D tech — and that makes sense, given that the company says it’s based on plenoptic technology.

It’s more complicated in movie theaters or on a TV, where you have to somehow steer separate images to each eye from one screen. The glasses you get in movie theaters use polarized lenses to block out certain kinds of light – the projector basically beams out alternating images for each eye, but with a difference in the projection that enables the glasses to filter only the correct frame to the correct eye.

Existing glasses-free 3D TV tech (and the Nintendo 3DS) mostly uses lenticular lensing on the panel, which means that tiny lenses on the screen surface steer some light to the left and some light to the right – so if you stand in the (usually very small) sweet spot where the light is correctly steered to each eye, you’ll see a 3D effect (though generally with lower resolution).

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But plenoptic/light field tech is different, because it’s not based on having a stereoscopic image – and this means you don’t have a tiny sweet spot for watching glasses-free 3D, and you don’t need glasses at all because it doesn’t rely on each eye only being able to see a specific ‘version’ of an image.

You’re not going to be able to see any effect from the light field tech in these photos, because the whole point is that the image just looks normal in every other way… (Image credit: Future / Disney)

The idea of light field tech is that – on the camera side – you can capture the many angles that light emerges from a scene, not just the single angle of light that a regular camera does. And you then preserve that 3D light direction information, instead of burning it into the form of 2D pixels.

And on the display side, the screens can recreate a certain amount of the scatter of light from the original scene to your eyes, enabling your brain to do what it’s really good at: taking a load of light coming to your eyes in different directions, and creating an orderly 3D view based on it.

There are different ways to achieve this kind of scattering of light on the hardware side. One is with micro lens arrays (a piece of tech OLED TV fans will be familiar with from its appearing on the LG G4 OLED TV as a way to improve brightness), or a diffractive backlight layer can be used (i.e., a tiny grid over the light behind an LCD panel), which are both essentially different approaches to directing light in many directions.

Of course, no one is capturing movies using plenoptic cameras, so now we come back around to why Visual Semiconductor is saying that GF3D is essentially a new format: part of its system is the ability to take any 2D movie or TV show and to emulate the light field effect from it, turning it into a version that your brain can then create a 3D image from.

TCL didn’t say much about its version of creating the light field image, but it presumably works the same way with 2D video. Speaking to TCL about the tech, it used virtual Dolby Atmos from soundbars as an analogy.

This plays around with the timing of when sounds emit and how sound reflects in a room to create a 3D audio effect, because the sound processing knows how the brain will interpret this into a cohesive whole if tricked correctly.

Essentially, this tech is using tricks in how the brain processes visual information to make it think it’s looking at a 3D image. And it works really well.

This man really pops out from the rocks behind him, I assure you (Image credit: Future)

First up for me was the GF3D TV, which was built on an 8K 65-inch panel. In this case, I was steered to a specific distance away to enjoy the 3D effect, so there is still a sweet spot to a degree, but it’s broad enough that multiple people can watch the TV next to each other without losing the effect – and the folks at Visual Semiconductor told me that you could potentially tell the TV how are you’re sitting from it, and it’ll adjust itself to work for that distance.

I saw a video of someone fighting a monster, and the depth in the image was truly remarkable. One of the interesting things is that a lot of good small-screen 3D (such as the prototype of Samsung’s glasses-free 3D monitor that I saw at last year’s CES) has more depth into the screen than popping out from it, but this had a really good balance of both.

It doesn’t suffer from the unnatural motion you get from a lot of 3D video (The high frame-rate sections in the latter Avatar movies have really spoiled 24fps 3D with glasses for me now), and has way more visual pop than we’re used to from 3D displays, which often come with the side effect of really limiting brightness.

The best of both worlds

Later, I saw TCL’s prototype, which was also an 8K 65-inch screen – and of the two, it impressed me even more, even though it also wasn’t quite as impressive in one way.

One advantage of the TCL TV is that the demo footage was of Deadpool & Wolverine – a movie I’ve seen in 2D, unlike the footage on the GF3D TV, I wasn’t familiar with – so I really got a sense of what the TV was adding over the standard version.

I would say that the 3D was less prominent on the TCL panel, but was still clear and additive. In ideal shots, like a portrait of Wade standing in front of a distant background, he stands out clearly – his edges are natural but well defined, your eye focuses on him easily, and he feels solid in the frame.

Like the GF3D, everything is also as bright and colorful as it feels like it’s supposed to be. The prototype didn’t have the same pop as the best TVs do, but that’s fine – it still looked like a proper version of the movie.

But what really impressed me about TCL’s version was how well it handled me moving out of the zone where you get the full 3D effect. The 3D effect reduced gracefully as I moved more to the side, so I still got a little hint of it when watching strongly off angle – until the point where it became 2D, but even then I could just… watch in 2D from an angle, if that’s where I’d ended up sitting.

From this angle, there was still a subtle depth effect – and as you can see, there’s no problem with the colors from the changed viewing angle (Image credit: Future)

I don’t think the GF3D TV degraded as gently when I moved out of the best viewing zone, meaning that while that might have the best 3D effect, the TCL version was something that instantly made me think, ‘Oh, I could live with this in the house’.

Naturally, with Avatar: Fire and Ash having recently come out, I’ve been talking to people in the last few months about those movies, and how I love them (come at the in the comments, bro), but I’ve never watched one at home, and I never will.

They are supposed to be seen in 3D, utterly enveloping your vision. I’ve seen them multiple times that way – and these TVs are the first time I’ve thought, ‘I would enjoy Avatar at home on this.’

But not only that – I was just talking to someone just this weekend about the value of watching Gravity at home in 2D. I think that movie works perfectly that way, but the person I was talking to had only ever seen it on its original release, in 3D at the theater, and has a specific memory of being blown away by it, including the 3D, and they want that experience again. And I totally get it.

While the world of 3D movies isn’t full of classics that must be watched in 3D to be truly enjoyed, there are enough that I do sometimes lament not having a 3D TV anymore to watch them the way I remember them: Hugo, Life of Pi, Coraline, Pacific Rim.

Having written off 3D movies as something that was probably never coming back into my living room, I’m now a believer again. We’ll see if the tech ever actually makes it to TVs, though… I suspect there may not be enough people like me.

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Matt is TechRadar’s Managing Editor for Entertainment, meaning he’s in charge of persuading our team of writers and reviewers to watch the latest TV shows and movies on gorgeous TVs and listen to fantastic speakers and headphones. It’s a tough task, as you can imagine. Matt has over a decade of experience in tech publishing, and previously ran the TV & audio coverage for our colleagues at T3.com, and before that he edited T3 magazine. During his career, he’s also contributed to places as varied as Creative Bloq, PC Gamer, PetsRadar, MacLife, and Edge. TV and movie nerdism is his speciality, and he goes to the cinema three times a week. He’s always happy to explain the virtues of Dolby Vision over a drink, but he might need to use props, like he’s explaining the offside rule.

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