A team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) with help from Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science has developed a new display that allows movie theater audiences to watch films in 3D without those annoying glasses that are somehow always either scuffed or scratched.

As explained in the short clip above, traditional display technology attempts to cover a wide angle of view - a technique that results in poor resolution. MIT's new technique, Cinema 3D, delivers a narrow view of angular images to each individual seat in the theater using an array of mirrors and lenses that make the 3D effect pop from multiple angles.

Some are no doubt wondering what the big deal is considering most 3D televisions for the home are capable of displaying the effect without glasses. The method used by home TVs, which involve a series of slits in front of the screen that allow each eye to see a different set of pixels, simply isn't scalable to movie theaters as the parallax barriers they create need to be a consistent distance from the viewer. In a large movie theater with potentially dozens of rows, it just won't work.

The researchers behind the prototype say it's not yet ready to hit the market but they seem confident that future revisions would be suitable for widespread consumer use.