Philips' glasses-free 3D TV used lenses, not holography

What you see

A flat-panel TV or monitor shows a moving picture with a 3D look to the naked eye, no glasses, from within roughly the display's front-facing cone. Wired's 2008 report on Philips' then-new set describes a 56-inch panel with four times normal HD resolution, shown at a Hollywood event, with Philips promising 'up to 46 views at once' so several seats each get a 3D image.

How it works

Dimenco's own archived page states the effect uses 'a so-called lenticular lens,' a sheet 'not smooth, but... given ripples,' so 'the emitted light is fractured in various oriented ways' and each eye receives a different slice of the picture, the same disparity a separate Dimenco page says the brain normally uses to judge distance. Dimenco states it manufactures the ripples with a process it calls Dimenco Clear View, introduced 'during SID 2012,' angling the ripples rather than running them vertically, which the company says raises the view count from 'the customary 7-9' to 28. No interference pattern is stored anywhere; only a lens sheet is bonded over an LCD panel.

Viewing conditions and limits

Wired's report states the original Philips set reached a 160-degree viewing angle; Dimenco's later page claims 150 degrees and says its angled ripples avoid 'black stripes' appearing as a viewer moves, a known weak point of earlier lenticular designs. Both describe a fixed number of discrete views (46, or later 28) rather than a smooth range, so a viewer between two views can see crosstalk. Wired notes Philips paired the launch with its own '3D WoW' conversion software, since ordinary unconverted video will not show the effect.

What it is not

This is not holography of any kind; Dimenco's own materials describe only a lens array and view-splitting, never a recorded wavefront. The lineage has since rebranded: as retrieved 16 September 2026, dimenco.eu now presents the company as 'Immersity,' operated by Leia Inc., describing 'Switchable-Display Hardware' and 'true holographic depth,' language this entry treats as current marketing rather than a change in the lens-based mechanism, since the live page gives none of the optical detail the earlier Dimenco pages did.

• How many discrete views does the panel generate, and what viewing angle is it rated for?
• Does ordinary 2D or stereo content need separate conversion software to work, as Philips' original WoW technology did?
• Does the vendor's technical documentation describe a lenticular lens, a switchable lens layer, or another mechanism, since marketing has used one term across several?

Philips and Dimenco's own pages describe a lens array splitting a screen's light toward each eye, an optical trick with real limits, not the holography its later marketing has invoked.