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3D LCD's for Sale
Hollinger writes "Dimension Technologies, Inc. has created and is selling LCD displays that yield true 3D images without tracking hardware. 'No Glasses. No Headtrackers. No Eyestrain. No Compromise. No Kidding,' according to their Web site. " I'll believe it when I see it, but can you imagine playing Everquest or something on this thing?
Everquest would definitely be slick, but would this thing be fast enough to keep up with Q3Arena ? What kind of refresh rates can we pull out of LCD these days ?
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
...somone could devise some way for a user to interact with that in realtime to chage what they see. 3D Quake, here we come...
Long signatures suck.
Wow... they're kinda doing for video what Aureal has been trying to do with 3-D sound. A shame they didn't post any prices on the page...
I always thought that the latest work with blue lasers and holograms would be the forerunners of this type of 3-D display technology, but I guess I was wrong.
-- Win2k: "It's not so much that it's only 65,000 bugs, it's just that they stopped at 65,535 to prevent an overflow."
If you go to the "mission" link, you will see in the time line that the 12" version was introduced in 1997 while the larger 15" and 18" versions were introduced in 1998.
So it is surprising that manufacturers have not yet picked up that technology. Maybe it is not that good after all? While it is understandable that DTI does not want to give out technical details, it makes me sceptical not to know even the basic idea of how it works.
This has been featured on slashdot at least once.. maybe even Twice.
Apparently this works by creating some kind of array of bumps on the screen so that one eye sees one image and the other eye sees a different image. My guess is that your head has to in just the right position or it won't work. You would probably have to program the game specially for 3D. If this isn't how it works, could someone please explain it to me, because this is the best I can come up with after reading their website?
It looks like complete marketing propaganda to me. There is absolutely no mention of how the actual technology works, or how the 3-d image is generated or displayed. Until I can see and read about the technical aspects, I have to regard this as 'yet another overhyped 3-D display technology' that doesn't actually work. I'm darn curious how they intend to get the appearance of depth out of a flat display without somehow getting different pictures to each eye.
I mean really, just how many press releases like this have you seen? I've seen quite a few. Don't go spending your money yet.
Has anyone actually used this kind of display before? Does anyone know what makes this special, or better than existing 3-D display devices?
-dennis towne
Alter Aeon Multiclass MUD - http://www.alteraeon.com
Ahh, the Russians have had these capabilities for years, its called "clay pottery" and involves the realtime molding of clay by a team of russians who hide behind your monitor.
The U.S. could have had this working long ago if they hadn't cut their spending on high speed kiln research.
Hotnutz.com - Funny
Under the news section there are a few articles which give a brief rundown on how it works. Here's one description.
y _Floats_3D_Models_In_Air.html
http://www.dti3d.com/news/Machine_Design_Displa
I'm wondering, how does this system deal with people with different eye spacings? I would guess that your distance from the monitor must make a difference too. I hope the spacing between the illumination lines is adjustable.
cot
The Human Interfaces Technology Lab at U Washington has some cool projects going on.
The one I thought was really neat are their Virtual Retinal Displays which can scan a 3D image directly onto your retinas using tiny lasers. That would rock for Unreal TE.
numb
Apparently the revie w in Machine Design says that "The screen uses a liquid-crystal display and an illumination plate. The LCD generates translucent colors while the plate carries light lines or pencil-thin light generators that run the height of the unit and are spaced on a two-pixel pitch. The plate also holds lenticular lenses that direct light at a slight angle. The LCDs are wired so that every other column displays image information intended for a viewer's left eye and the other columns for the right. In the current design, both halves of a stereo pair are displayed simultaneously. Several people can view stereo images at once.".
This sort of makes more sense if you see the diagrams on the page, but I would have thought that it would require you to be pretty much directly in front of the screen and viewing it at a perpendicular angle, (from a certain distance) otherwise you are going to start receiving the wrong information to each eye.
However, once you have it calibrated for your eye seperation, I see no reason why you shouldn't get really strong stereoscopic images. When's the next trade show near Brussels so I can try it out?
Interesting side point: The press on this form of 3d vision on their web site dates back to 1994 so it's not exactly cutting edge (unless they've recently undergone a quantum leap forwards and I haven't picked up on this from the site).
The only Good System is a Sound System
Does the fact that they are clameing to be able to do something revolutionary but give not specific details make anyone wonder about how well this works. 3D is one of those things that can be done poorly or can be done well, but I have this nagging feeling that if they had it working well they would say a little more about its effects. This sort of thing just makes me suspicious
I posted this as a reply above, but people keep asking.
y _Floats_3D_Models_In_Air.html
They give a brief mention of how it works under a few of the articles in the news section. Here's one:
http://www.dti3d.com/news/Machine_Design_Displa
cot.
The bigest flaw I see with these is that they're still analog. Anyone who has ever used a digital panel (such as the SGI 1600SW) knows the advantage of digital, and its precise positioning of pixels on the screen. This would be crucial to the ability of something like this to function adequately.
everytime i try to connect to their servers i get an error "Server returned file with no content" anyone else getting this?
Only dead fish swim with the stream...
If that works, I want it now! :)
That sure beats mirrors, but I guess you'd still have to get a "3-D!" digital camera with two lenses, and whatnot, just to take pictures. And movies would be fun, but take up at least 2-3 times the bandwidth.
Oh well. One small step for LCD's, one giant leap for Virtual Reality!
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Objects near the edge of the screen would lose the 3rd dimension (because of the delta between the left and right images displayed on the screen), so wouldn't a 3d scene have an annoying fuzzy area around the entire edge of the screen that gives you a headache? -Ellis
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Ummmmmmmmmmmmmmm..... Gouda
http://www.research.philips.com/generalinfo/specia l/3dlcd/tech/tech.htm
All this is fine for Cmdr-"I'm an Instant Internet Millionaire"-Taco but are they affordable for the average Joe?
I could be mistaken, but it sounds like a different type of technology to me.
whatever works, i want a 3D IMAX equivalent experience on my computer, dammit!
cot
Don't get your hopes up. The best you might see are CAD/CAM programs or perhaps use in a few video arcade machines. Either way, you'll still need your regular monitor for the majority of your work.
I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
As others have mentioned, this isn't a brand new
innovation, and to quell some of the anti-hype
I thought I should mention that there was a display of 3D Flat Panel LCD screens at the CN-Tower in Toronto a couple of years ago, back
when they had Q-Zar in the basement.
Unfortunatly I can't remember the name/logo that
was stuck on them, but I wouldn't be suprised if
it was Honda. (Seriously) Could just as easily
been Hitachi or Sony or any of the other tech
firms that value R&D.
To echo a few of the other comments, they were
of a "polarized" design, where the angle between
your eyes gave each one a slightly shifted field
of view. The best image was obtained by standing
a short distance away and being centered on the
display.
I was impressed, the video that was used as a demo included white-water rafting, the illusion only
spoiled when water droplets hit the case containing the cameras as they were too "close"
so the "depth" perception was distorted.
Well i guess this explains a lot to me anyway. ... nerds don't play Everquest on windose computers.
Quite simply
That in this case would be successful capitalists. In the usual style this involves ripoffs.
http://www.observer.com/pages/envelope.htm
I tried to end my account by asking but it's not working.
CC
"Pray arm me further by your reply" Winston Churchill
On a related note, does anyone have information on which (if any) digital flat panel monitors work with Linux? I'm using an IBM T55D, and there's a horrendous kludge to get it to work with XFree86 and the Matrox G200 (involves loadlin, DOS stuff, and framebuffer driver). I'm trying to get it to work with a Guillemot Hercules 3D Prophet DDR-DVI. The NVidia GeForce 256 X Server works fine with a CRT monitor, but I can't get anything except junk to display on the LCD (it does text mode just fine, though, and the VGA 16 server works in 640x480 so things like XF86Setup will display). Horrors, I tried it on a Windows box and I think it queries the flat screen for specs, because it worked perfectly without needing any monitor info files. Any solutions or suggestions for working video card/digital lcd combinations under Linux?
Perhaps I misunderstand your remarks about the "delta" thing, but could you not make the same argument about the 3D image you see looking out a window? I don't get a headache from any fuzzy area around the edges of a window.
--
Patrick Doyle
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Resolutions other than 1024x768 are displayed in a window, unscaled. No thanks. Until LCD technology can catch up to CRT (more than 256,000 colours, 120Hz refresh, higher resolutions, multiple full-screen resolutions, brightness/contrast, more viewing angles, lower cost, etc..) I will not purchase one, because my current monitor with my LCD glasses outperform anything out there.
I used to take a lot of lenticular 3D pictures for fun, and I always thought that with digital LCD screens it would be easy to do no-glasses 3D video with that technology, if you could get the right density of lenticular film to match the screen's dot-pitch. I'm surprised it's taken them this long, but maybe it's because LCD screens are still way too expensive.
Bragging about not needing a head-tracker is silly, it's a limitation, not an advantage (unless their device does some kind of funky position-sensing on your head, which I doubt). But it should be functionally equivalent to a monitor with shutter-glasses so I suppose you could add a head tracker if you wanted to. You'd have to keep your head vertical for it to work though.
This technique is also limited to pretty low resolutions, which is fine for consumers like me but I wonder if they can make it cheap enough. I think the holographic-film technique has more promise for higher-end applications.
Finally a funny quote from the Philips 3D page:
"Multiview 3D-LCD as developed by Philips is truly
autostereoscopic because it requires no artificial devices,"
---The Vicar---
I've been looking at the tech specs for this. I can't help but think that a real 3d display would give more info than something like "supports 1024x1240 resolution". Where's the DEPTH??? How about 640x400x400 or something like that?
This looks really neat, to say the least. They don't mention a price, though. It's probably well above $1000, seeing as it's basically a flat-panel display with calibrated backlighting and fancy circuitry.
Soo many applications... I could probably rig POV-ray to do spiffy 3d with it, it would rock for 3d games (well, maybe not.. it seems like you have to keep your head straight, not something that happens often when gaming), it might also be good for VRML... Ooh the possibilities...
--
Seeing is believing; You wouldn't have seen it if you didn't believe it.
Did anyone notice that below the specs they give on the product page there is a disclaimer that the specs can change without notice? I find this very disturbing. They could just say its 3d and then sell you a 2d monitor.
Instead of giving you a giant results URL, I'll explain how to do it:
I'm not enough of a hardware guy to understand how this display actually works, but maybe someone here can comment on that!
While this sounds really cool (and it may be one day), for now, nothing works with it. For best effects, you need to encode anything with 2 cameras. To program Quake to use this, just imagine what it would be like. That and it is just analog makes it fairly uninteresting as far as I am concerned. Note, at least the thing has a 2D/3D button so you won't ruin your eyes on reading funky looking text.
Hammacher Schlemmer had a booth there, and showed a 3D video of people kyaking down a river. You didn't need glasses, and you had to stand in just the right place to eliminate the moire-like interference effects caused by the way it did the 3D, but it did work.
It was cool, but I'd personally prefer to wear some lightweight 3D glasses rather than ensure I'm always in the exact position to get the full 3D effect. However, I don't know why we haven't seen at least a few of these for sale by now, as I imagine they would have their niche.
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In UT, there are still plenty of 2d sprites. The most obvious is the sniper scope. I know quite a lot of people who have played UT with 3d glasses and they all say that using the sniper rifle with 3d glasses sucks because it tries to overlay a 2d sprite on a 3d world so though you think you have targetted someone, when you actually fire, the shot is miles away from the actual target. It is so annoying that those whom I knew gave up on the glasses in UT.
.agrippa.
The Heinrich-Hertz-Institute has released some detailed papers about projection technology like this a long time ago. Especially interesting is the proposal for an operating system using the stereoscopic image.
The display
Something about the Operating System for the screen.
press release about all this.
It's from 1997 actually
And if my eyes glaze over (focussed on exactly one spot), then the advert can grow bigger and brighter? Maybe start blinking at me?
Everquest and Q3A nothin'.... I want one of these for those late-night NetHack sessions.
If Voin the Male Elven Ranger is going to be Killed in Orion's Camp by a Hallucinogen-Distorted Winged Gargoyle, I want to see it in 3D!
-Ravagin
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Karma: T-rexcellent.
'Nuff said...not. Here's flamebait with profanity for ya: who the fuck cares? I don't think I've seen it here. I'm betting there are other folks too that haven't seen it here. So shove it. I can't be more plain about it. It's so fucking obnoxious I think I need to go vomit. If you've seen it before...whaddaya want, a cookie? A hankie? Awwwww....poor baby. well, there go any karma points I might have had... :^)
just imagine the usefulness of these LCDs on a palm. that would be pretty cool...
jaguar.
visit the Guidelight Project
...and it was good! The 3D generated by the screen was quite impressive, although you do have to be within a certain radius of the screen. The coolest thing about it, I though, was that it natively supports the Apple Game Sprockets' Goggle Sprocket. So, it works natively with the Mac OS.
Furthermore, they would have to paralyze your eyemuscles, as the eyes tend to move all over the place without you even realizing it. Even at such a course resolution, involuntary eye movements of about a mm would disrupt the careful setup.
These measures of course would only work if everyone's head would be the same size, seeing as that different head-sizes tend to lead to different distances between the eyes (the distance between the left eye and the right eye, and the distorted projection each eye receives because of this, is what leads to 3D vision). Of course this problem could be solved by configuring the display for each user individually.
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score -2, dumb
ActiveWorlds, I guess formerly is AlphaWorlds IMHO make a good virtual community. I guess if this Gadget is not limited to high end SGI workstations later, boundary between webpages and "webWorld" will be burred. And VRML can live off to its promises. VRML 2.0 hasn't received too much attention and CosmoPlayer from CosmoSoftware seemed to stop development. This could make VRML alive again.
Playing Quake seems to be not a big apps, but think about having real tele-presence. Imagine your girlfriend can do "Video" Conference right in front of your eyes ! However I think it is still a long way to beam a 3D object and render it 2000 miles away.
Personally I am amazed by this LCD so much. I have been to Siggraph 99 LA and I saw there is a Crystal Ball-like device developed from Germany. (Can somebody get the URL?) They paint a wire-frame object with Laser. In contrast, this LCD can render real objects.
Quoted from Wired News :
I just want to see my honey in 3D, not with that Netmeeting thing in the size of stamp.
What will this do for file size? Could you have a 3-D JPEG? Is the depth good enough to describe, say, your average set of Baywatch boobs?
For true stereo sound, you must stand in the middle of the speakers.. or wear the lightweight headphones and move as you wish...
but now with our quadriphonic systems we can move about quite freely and still get a good effect~
now apply this to current video technology.. it's on "mono"!
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
bla
(That's assuming no nifty differential tricks for encoding the second image as a delta from the first).
I saw a demonstration of a simple hack to convert a laptop to do this at a conference a few years back. (Cost: About 15 cents.)
You make a moire plate by hacking up a postscript program to draw thin lines across a page with a spacing of half the pixel spacing on your LCD panel. (Tune the program as necessary to get the spacing right.) Print it on an overhead-projector transparency and mount it over your LCD display.
Each eye sees half the scan lines, with the other half are blocked by the black stripes. One eye gets one half, the other eye the other half.
You typically have to rotate the display a quarter turn, because the typical display has vertical color stripes, so using it in the normal position will give you half the colors, rather than half the scanlines, into each eye.
In addition to having the right spacing on the plate (very slightly closer together than twice the line spacing), and the right distance from the plate to the pixels (which you get by tuning that "slightly" so the plate can sit on the screen, typically with the toner on the side toward your eye), you have to be roughly centered in front of the screen and roughly the right distance from it.
The obvious improvement(which I've been meaning to do for a couple years, if nobody got around to it commercially - and it looks like these guys did) is to replace the flat plastic sheet with light-absorbent stripes with one with triangular and slightly curved ridges - exactly the sort of plastic stuff you see in those thick, non-holographic pictures, some of which are 3-D, others animated-when-you-move-your-head-or-the-picture. This does the same thing by bending, rather than blocking, the light, so you don't have to waste half of it.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I'm wondering, how does this system deal with people with different eye spacings?
If your eyes are farther apart than the ones the screen was designed for, sit proportionally farther back. Closer together, proportionally closer to the screen.
Think of the light for the right and left eyes as a pair of beams that diverge from the screen. Farther back, farther apart.
There's a limit to this, because the screen is wide so there has to be a small difference in the direction of the light as you go from side to side. This results in an approximation of focusing the light at the stock eye locations. So if your eyes are TOO far off the standard, you won't be able to get the whole screen to work right at the same time - if you've got the middle right the edges will start to blurr together. But your eye separation would have to be WAY off the normal for this to happen.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
There are very few things I could see a screen/GUI like that being useful for. A 3D user interface would suck for any normal office type thing, and a screen with only one viewable point would suck for multiplayer games. I expect this plus eye trackers will find its first main uses in a few specialized engineering terminals, and after that in single-player-game arcade machines.
What about those of us who do NOT have stereoscopic vision? The stupid glasses don't work for me. Will this? Somehow I doubt it.
Ask anyone who was born with a lazy eye. Frequently, even if surgery is done (as it was - twice - in my case), they cannot get it _quite_ perfect. The eyes might _look_ right, but they aren't. Stereoscopic vision (seeing the two images combined as one 3d image) doesn't happen if your eyes are not in the same places in the sockets. I get two images. I tend to block one out unconsciously, and look through the other eye. I've even learned to imitate depth vision like that (I can hit a basketball hoop with the ball even from weird angles - I don't need the backboard, because I use the ground between me and it to get my bearings). Unfortunately, I can't do that for 3d stuff. It has to be really 3d, or all I see is a red (or green) image (or both, one of each, if I'm tired and can't block properly - THAT gets confusing).
Holograms work though. Hmm... I wonder if there is a way to make a holographic-type screen system? Or is someone working on a different way to make it possible to see 3d, for those of us who don't have the vision for the normal way?
-Elthia
Philips have a 3D LCD prototype:o to/index.htm
http://www. research.philips.com/generalinfo/special/3dlcd/pr
Suprisingly enough, you will need to have 3d vision in order to see 3D images. This won't "fix" anyones lack of an eye or other vision defects. Sorry.
If you read the article it explains how it was done. They used a screen in front of the display to generate images that are slightly angled to each eye. Unfortunately you must be a fixed distance from the screen in order for it to work.
Link to how it works
..........FULL STOP.
...and im going down to theyre office monday morning to see one of these things. i live 10 minutes away hehe
Ever seen those 3d bookmark things that have the bumpy plastic on them? Same thing.
Unlike traditional three dimensional (3D) television, which uses two cameras simultaneously to give a sense of perspective, this new system uses just one camera, but with a special lens, made up from 2500 tiny micro-lenses. These micro-lenses split the picture into thousands of tiny images, each with a slightly different view of the object. This means the camera is filming from hundreds and hundreds of different angles, all at the same time.
I have a dominant eye, so I don't use stereoscopic vision. But I saw this on the program and the picture on the 3D TV showed a few geometric shapes at different depths. They moved the camera dolly sideways and it looked like it was completely 3D.
Another interesting link is: NHK Research labs
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