Future Macs, external Apple monitors may be able to display 3D images

Future Macs, external Apple monitors may be able to display 3D images, as evidenced by a newly filed patent (number US 20240112628 A1) by Apple for “Displays With Selective Pixel Brightness Tuning.”

About the patent filing

According to the patent filing these devices could offer spatial computing features via displays that could include lenticular lenses that enable the display to provide 3D content to the viewer. The lenticular lenses may be formed over an array of pixels such as organic light-emitting diode pixels or liquid crystal display pixels.

A lenticular display could show and hide subtly different parts of an image, depending the user’s angle of view. The effect is that as a user moves their head, or alters their gaze, they see parallax-like changes and so the image appears 3D, according to Apple.

Hmmm. I wonder what effect this would have on sales of follow-up Vision Pro devices if such external monitors and Macs do come to pass.

Summary of the patent filing

Here’s Apple’s (rather technical) abstract of the patent filing: “An electronic device may include a lenticular display. The lenticular display may have a lenticular lens film formed over an array of pixels. A plurality of lenticular lenses may extend across the length of the display. The lenticular lenses may be configured to enable stereoscopic viewing of the display such that a viewer perceives three-dimensional images. 

“The display may have a number of independently controllable viewing zones. The viewer may be particularly susceptible to artifacts caused by crosstalk at the edge viewing zones within the primary field of view of the display. Certain types of content may also be more vulnerable to crosstalk than other types of content. Therefore, to mitigate crosstalk artifacts, the pixel value for each pixel may be adjusted based on the viewing zone of the respective pixel and content information (such as texture information or brightness information) associated with the respective pixel.”