This TV Does 3-D Without the Glasses, and It Doesn’t Look Half Bad

Ultra-D

A funny thing happened to me at the DICE Summit in Las Vegas last week: I glanced upward and found myself staring into a 3-D television.

I was at the gaming industry conference to try to get a glimpse of the future of videogames, and maybe this is one facet of it. I’ve used 3-D televisions before, of course, but you can’t accidentally happen upon those. You’ve got to put on the glasses, get yourself situated, the whole routine. So to look upwards at the TV mounted on the bar and realize that there was a depth illusion happening there—that was pretty weird.

What I was looking at was called Ultra-D, a glasses-free 3-D tech that’s been making the rounds at the electronics trade shows for a couple of years now. Representatives from the company at DICE told me they’re hoping to actually have some TVs using the tech in homes within this year. So who knows, maybe you’ll be trying this for yourself soon enough.

If you’re going to be in the market for a giant 4K TV this year, I mean. Stream TV Networks, the company behind Ultra-D, isn’t actually manufacturing televisions. It’s looking to spin up what it refers to as the “Intel Inside”-style business model: Licensing the technology to a range of manufacturers, who can then build it into their sets. It estimates that including its 3-D display might add around 10 percent to the retail price of the television.

Stream TV

Stream TV says that Ultra-D displays will have a 140-degree viewing angle, which means that multiple viewers should all be able to see the effect while hanging out on the couch. If you’re outside of that window, you’ll just perceive a 2-D image.

But Ultra-D is promising more than just a glasses-free 3-D display. It also includes a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, which enables the sets to convert any 2-D content on the fly to 3-D. I didn’t actually see this in action—Stream TV’s reps showed me a snippet of the classic 1946 film It’s a Wonderful Life in 3-D, but said that had been converted by hand. (And we’ll leave for later the question as to whether anyone should be converting It’s a Wonderful Life into 3-D.)

While Ultra-D will thus add depth effects to your existing videogames—while the TV sets must be 4K to work with the tech, the content doesn’t have to be 4K resolution—Stream TV also said it would work with game developers if they wanted to add native support into their games.

If you encounter Ultra-D over the next year, perhaps it’ll be in a public venue. One of the concepts Stream TV showed in its demo was the idea of having a 3-D TV in a movie theater’s lobby to advertise gift cards or popcorn. Maybe that’s a more realistic scenario for those of us who aren’t quite into the idea of upgrading our TV again this year. (And I can vouch for the fact that having one sitting in a public place certainly got my attention.)