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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
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.
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.
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---
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!
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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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
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
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.
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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