How do shutter glasses work

Instead, shutter glasses work through LCD screen technology that darkens each lens, alternating the left and the right. Shutter glasses are usually battery powered, or even USB-supported, and are more expensive than traditional 3D glasses.

The cost of these glasses make a huge difference to the image quality. You can get shutter glasses from Samsung, Panasonic, Sony, and more. How 3D glasses work depends solely on how the eyes work and communicate with your brain. Human eyes have binocular vision that works best when you use both eyes simultaneously. Binocular vision gives you depth perception and allows you to tell which objects in your line of sight are closer or farther away.

Binocular vision relies on the distance between your eyes to present you with two different perspectives on the same thing. Geoff Morrison helps him out. The technology First, the basics. In order for you to see "depth" from a 3D TV, each eye has to see slightly different information. Ideally, the right eye doesn't see any of the information meant for the left eye, and vice versa. The two current methods to do this are called active and passive. Active 3D uses battery-operated shutter glasses that do as their name describes: they rapidly shutter open and closed.

This, in theory, means the information meant for your left eye is blocked from your right eye by a closed opaque shutter. All that's required of the TV is the capability to refresh fast enough so each eye gets at least 60 frames per second.

They've been able to do this for a while. Here's what the active glasses look like when they're working. Keep in mind the camera was set at a fast shutter speed itself in order to capture the lenses, well, shuttering. Passive uses inexpensive polarized glasses, like what you get at most movie theaters. The TV has a special filter that polarizes each line of pixels. This filter a Film Patterned Retarder is one type makes the odd lines on the screen only visible to the left eye, and the even lines only visible to the right.

Without the glasses, the TV looks normal. Now here's the same TV, but viewed through the glasses. Note the "missing" lines. This is because the camera is only viewing the TV through one lens of the passive glasses click to enlarge. The glasses recreate that triangulation by feeding distinct images to the eyes. They approximate the offsets, depending on how far things are, that your eyes expect in life. With the glasses back on, your brain merges those images to create the perception of depth.

The lenses control what each eye sees by filtering the light going to each eye, only letting certain wavelengths pass.

Filmmakers consider how the degree of offset between these images translates to depth inside our brains. By drawing the images on top of each other, viewers will see a flat image on screen the offset between the eyes is zero. Shifting in the opposite direction pushes the image back. Nowadays, we avoid this problem by using glasses that work with polarization. Light is an electromagnetic wave traveling along a particular plane. Theaters use two forms of polarization for 3-D movies — linear and circular.

Digital IMAX theaters use linear polarization. They align two projectors so images line up on the screen. One projector displays images intended for the left eye, and the other for the right, with a polarizing filter in front of each projector.

Light from one projector is polarized in one direction and light from the other is polarized along the perpendicular direction. Your brain merges the images to see depth. Circular polarization avoids this problem. A device in front of one project flips rapidly between the two forms of circular polarization.

Admission Essay. Ben Davis February 17, How active shutter glasses work? Are active 3D glasses better than passive?

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