3-D pictures and displays have been with us for many years...

Leonardo Da Vinci realised that we needed to see two different pictures, one for each eye, to truly capture reality in a painting (top right image) and even earlier, Euclid laid down the foundations of stereoscopic art - two thousand years ago!

However, it wasn't until 1832 that Charles Wheatstone invented a stereoscopic viewer, based on two pictures and mirrors. These eventually became popular as the Victorian parlour 'stereoscopes'. These were the first mass-market 3-D displays. These viewers worked similarly to the Viewmaster toys, which are still in production today!

The problem with these viewers as that only one person could view the 3d image at a time. This problem was solved in 1895 by Ducos du Hauron with anaglyph glasses. This worked by colouring the two eye pictures, one red and one cyan, and then using coloured glasses to filter the correct image to each eye. Although this solved the problem of multiple viewers, it also addressed a new problem of having to wear these special glasses in order to view the image.

This problem was overcome in 1903 by F. E. Ives with the parallax stereogram (middle right image). This works by interleaving the left and right images in vertical strips. A barrier of vertical slits are then placed in front of the picture so that the left eye can only see through the slits to the left picture, and the right eye to the right picture. Again, this fixed the problem of the special glasses, but posed a new (possibly worse) problem of having to stand in exactly the correct position to view the 3D image.



The MUTED project aims to solve all of these prolems and provide means for a consumer-friendly 3D display of today which supports multiple viewers, without glasses and without standing still!