Tech
Ultra-thin 3D display delivers wide-angle, highly-detailed images
Researchers have developed an ultra-thin 3D display with a wide viewing angle, clear image quality and vivid display depth. By overcoming tradeoffs that typically limit glasses-free 3D displays, the advance could open new possibilities for highly detailed interactive experiences in health care, education and entertainment.
“The new display is just 28 mm thick, dramatically slimmer than conventional directional backlight systems, which typically exceed 500 mm,” said research team leader Xu Liu, from Zhejiang University in China. “This level of compactness, combined with the substantial boost in resolution we achieved, represents an important step toward making the technology practical for real-world products.”
In Optica, the researchers demonstrate an ultra-slim 32-inch directional backlight-based prototype based on the new display design. The prototype is roughly the size of a large computer monitor, has a wide viewing angle of over 120° and a large 3D display volume of 28 × 16 × 39 inches.
“The 3D display maintains crisp image quality across the entire imaging depth, which can help users visualize depth and spatial relationships for tasks requiring precise spatial understanding,” said Rengmao Wu from Zhejiang University, corresponding author of the paper. “This could, for example, help doctors easily see complex anatomical structures such as tumors or fractures in real time.”
Seeing 3D without glasses
3D light field displays create a scene by using a directional backlight to direct light in a highly controlled manner. This design allows each eye to see a slightly different image, creating a natural sense of depth without requiring the viewer to wear 3D glasses. The quality of the rendered 3D effect depends on how accurately the voxels—the 3D pixels that make up the image—are constructed, as well as on their number and size, since smaller, well-constructed voxels enable finer detail and more realistic depth.
“In light field displays employing diffraction gratings or cylindrical lens arrays, voxel size is fundamentally constrained by the angular spread of backlight illumination,” said Xinzhu Sang from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications in China, who made key contributions to the work. “Our system significantly improves voxel construction accuracy compared to existing scattering backlight-based 3D displays, achieving highly miniaturized voxels and substantial resolution enhancement.”
Freeform optics—advanced optical elements that use freeform surfaces to precisely control light—provided the design flexibility needed to create the ultra-slim yet expansive directional backlight system. Each beam-shaping channel of the display integrates an LED source, an aperture and a freeform lens that precisely redirects incident light to generate uniform illumination with precise directionality. The researchers tiled these beam-shaping channels to create a tailored large-area directional backlight system. The display also uses a module consisting of two layers of micro-triangular prisms to significantly improve backlight irradiance uniformity while preserving the directionality.

Clear gains over conventional displays
After making a 32-inch prototype based on the new design, the researchers evaluated its performance using a 50-mm fixed-focus lens with an f/2.8 aperture, a setup often used to simulate how the human eye perceives depth and clarity.
In one experiment, they used the ultra-thin 3D light-field display to render images of an astronaut floating outside a space station. The display exhibited a continuous depth range of 1 m and a viewing angle of more than 120°, providing an immersive and realistic visual experience.
They also compared the new design with conventional scattering backlight displays, finding that it produced six times smaller voxels and maintained resolution even when viewed from farther away. The display was also about 100-fold more efficient at using visual information to generate images than scattering backlight displays.
The researchers are now working to further reduce the thickness and weight of the device while improving its optical efficiency. For commercialization, they point out that more work is needed to develop smaller pixel structures, increase pixel density and optimize pixel shape to enhance compatibility with 3D display technology.
More information:
Zijun Zhang et al, Miniaturized-voxel light field panel displaybased on an ultra-slim and large-area freeform directional backlight, Optica (2025). DOI: 10.1364/optica.571647
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Ultra-thin 3D display delivers wide-angle, highly-detailed images (2025, November 5)
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Tech
Top Design Within Reach Promo Codes for March 2026
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Tech
A Billionaire-Backed Startup Wants to Grow ‘Organ Sacks’ to Replace Animal Testing
As the Trump administration phases out the use of animal experimentation across the federal government, a biotech startup has a bold idea for an alternative to animal testing: nonsentient “organ sacks.”
Bay Area-based R3 Bio has been quietly pitching the idea to investors and in industry publications as a way to replace lab animals without the ethical issues that come with living organisms. That’s because these structures would contain all of the typical organs—except a brain, rendering them unable to think or feel pain. The company’s long-term goal, cofounder Alice Gilman says, is to make human versions that could be used as a source of tissues and organs for people who need them.
For Immortal Dragons, a Singapore-based longevity fund that’s invested in R3, the idea of replacement is a core strategy for human longevity. “We think replacement is probably better than repair when it comes to treating diseases or regulating the aging process in the human body,” says CEO Boyang Wang. “If we can create a nonsentient, headless bodyoid for a human being, that will be a great source of organs.”
For now, R3 is aiming to make monkey organ sacks. “The benefit of using models that are more ethical and are exclusively organ systems would be that testing can be meaningfully more scalable,” Gilman says. (R3’s name comes from the philosophy in animal research known as the three R’s—replacement, reduction, and refinement—developed by British scientists William Russell and Rex Burch in 1959 to promote humane experimentation.)
New drugs are often tested in monkeys before they’re given to human participants in clinical trials. For instance, monkeys were critical during the Covid-19 pandemic for testing vaccines and therapeutics. But they’re also an expensive resource, and their numbers are dwindling in the US after China banned the export of nonhuman primates in 2020.
Animal rights activists have long pushed to end research on monkeys, and one of the seven federally funded primate research facilities across the country has signaled it would consider shutting down and transitioning into a sanctuary amid growing pressure. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is also winding down monkey research, part of a bigger trend across the government to reduce reliance on animal testing.
As a result, Gilman says, there aren’t enough research monkeys left in the US to allow for necessary research if another pandemic threat emerges. Enter organ sacks.
Organ sacks would in theory offer advantages over existing organs-on-chips or tissue models, which lack the full complexity of whole organs, including blood vessels.
Gilman says it’s already possible to create mouse organ sacks that lack a brain, though she and cofounder John Schloendorn deny that R3 has made them. (For the record, Gilman doesn’t like the term “brainless” to describe the organ sacks. “It’s not missing anything, because we design it to only have the things we want,” she says.) Gilman and Schloendorn would not say how exactly they plan to create the monkey and human organ sacks, but said they are exploring a combination of stem-cell technology and gene editing.
It’s plausible that organ sacks could be grown from induced pluripotent stem cells, says Paul Knoepfler, a stem cell biologist at the University of California, Davis. These stem cells come from adult skin cells and are reprogrammed to an embryonic-like state. They have the potential to form into any cell or tissue in the body and have been used to create embryo-like structures that resemble the real thing. By editing these stem cells, scientists could disable genes needed for brain development. The resulting embryo could then be incubated until it grows into organized organ structures.
Tech
A Mysterious Numbers Station Is Broadcasting Through the Iran War
“Tavajoh! Tavajoh! Tavajoh!” a man’s voice announces, before going on to narrate a string of numbers in no apparent order, slowly and rhythmically. After nearly two hours, the calls of “Attention!” in Persian stop, only to resume again hours later.
The broadcast has been playing twice a day on a shortwave frequency since the start of the US-Israel attack on Iran on February 28.
According to Priyom, an organization which tracks and analyses global military and intelligence use of shortwave radio, using established radio-location techniques, the broadcast was first heard as the US bombing of Iran began. It has since played on the 7910 kHz shortwave frequency like clockwork—at 02.00 UTC and again at 18.00 UTC.
Over the weekend, Priyom said it had identified the likely origin of the broadcast. Using multilateration and triangulation techniques, the group traced the signal to a shortwave transmission facility inside a US military base in Böblingen, southwest of Stuttgart, Germany.
The site lies within a restricted training area between Panzer Kaserne and Patch Barracks, with technical operations possibly linked to the US army’s 52nd Strategic Signal Battalion, headquartered nearby.
That identification narrows the field, but it does not reveal who is behind the transmissions or who they are meant for.
The two-hour-long transmission is divided into five to six segments, each lasting up to 20 minutes. Each opens with “Tavajoh!” before shifting into a string of numbers in Persian, sometimes punctuated with an English word or two. Five days into the broadcast, radio jammers were heard attempting to block the frequency. The following day, the transmission shifted to a different frequency—7842 kHz.
Radio communication experts believe the broadcast is likely part of a Cold War–era system known as number stations.
The Return of the Numbers
Number stations are shortwave radio broadcasts that play strings of numbers or codes that sound random—like the one now heard in Iran. “It is an encrypted radio message used by foreign intelligence services, often as part of a complex operation by intelligence agencies and militaries,” says Maris Goldmanis, a Latvian historian and avid numbers stations researcher.
Number stations are most commonly associated with espionage. “For intelligence agencies, it is important to communicate with their spies to gather intelligence,” says John Sipher, a former US intelligence officer who served 28 years in the CIA’s National Clandestine Service. “This is not always possible in person due to political constraints or conflict. This is where number stations come in.”
While the use of number stations can be traced back to the First World War, they gained prominence during the US-Soviet Cold War. As espionage grew more sophisticated, governments used automated voice transmissions of coded numbers to communicate with agents, Goldmanis says. Citing declassified KGB and CIA documents, he adds that number stations were widely used during this period, often as Morse code transmissions and, in many cases, as two-way communications, with agents reporting back using their own shortwave transmitters.
“Nowadays, you have various satellite and encrypted communications technologies,” Sipher says. “But during the Cold War and even before that, governments had to find ways to do this without being noticed, and broadcasting coded messages was one way to communicate with your assets discreetly.”
The apparent randomness of the numbers means they can be understood only with a codebook, Sipher adds. “Nobody can make heads or tails of it or understand what it says unless you have the codebook that can give you hints to decrypt the code,” he says, noting that such systems must be set up and coordinated in advance.
A Signal Without a Sender
While the likely origin of the signal may now be clearer, its purpose and intended recipient remain unknown.
Because the broadcasts are encrypted and designed to be covert, those details may remain unclear for years, Goldmanis says. The structured nature of the transmission—its fixed schedule and consistent use of frequencies—further suggests it is part of a planned operation.
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