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The research covered in this thesis encompasses a consideration of 3D television requirements and a survey of stereoscopic and autostereoscopic methods. This confirms that although there is a lot of activity in this area, very little of this work could be considered suitable for television. The principle of operation, design of the components of the optical system and evaluation of two EU-funded (MUTED & HELIUM3D projects) glasses-free (autostereoscopic) displays is described. Four iterations of the display were built in MUTED, with the results of the first used in designing the second, third and fourth versions. The first three versions of the display use two-49 element arrays, one for the left eye and one for the right. A pattern of spots is projected onto the back of the arrays and these are converted into a series of collimated beams that form exit pupils after passing through the LCD. An exit pupil is a region in the viewing field where either a left or a right image is seen across the complete area of the screen; the positions of these are controlled by a multi-user head tracker. A laser projector was used in the first two versions and, although this projector operated on holographic principles in order to obtain the spot pattern required to produce the exit pupils, it should be noted that images seen by the viewers are not produced holographically so the overall display cannot be described as holographic. In the third version, the laser projector is replaced with a conventional LCOS projector to address the stability and brightness issues discovered in the second version. In 2009, true 120Hz displays became available; this led to the development of a fourth version of the MUTED display that uses 120Hz projector and LCD to overcome the problems of projector instability, produces full-resolution images and simplifies the display hardware. HELIUM3D: A multi-user autostereoscopic display based on laser scanning is also described in this thesis. This display also operates by providing head-tracked exit pupils. It incorporates a red, green and blue (RGB) laser illumination source that illuminates a light engine. Light directions are controlled by a spatial light modulator and are directed to the users’ eyes via a front screen assembly incorporating a novel Gabor superlens. In this work is described that covered the development of demonstrators that showed the principle of temporal multiplexing and a version of the final display that had limited functionality; the reason for this was the delivery of components required for a display with full functionality.