3-D Monitor From Deep Video Imaging

Silver A writes: "Deep Video Imaging Ltd. has available monitors with real, physical depth, and touchscreen capability. Unfortunately, it's only 800 x 600 x 2 so far. The base model is only $8765.00 for US and Canadian customers. This looks really cool, but I'd like to know if they plan to go to more than 2 planes, and if they support X." Or, on the other hand, if X will support them. These may have limited utility as is, but undeniably cool.

Comments

Its not cool, currently, but has potential.

[torpor]

One thing you can't really do with hardware layering and mixdown is provide a feeling of space - with this screen you can move your head ever so slightly and get a concept of depth, even if its only minor.

This could have exciting implications for future GUI design, and if they perfect the manufacturing process to the point where more than 2 planes can be sandwiched (say, 32 or 64?) then we start seeing some really interesting opportunities for GUI design, not to mention the artistic value, which is often inappropriately overlooked in technology.

Imagine a GUI that gives you a degree of depth inherently without requiring large resources - buttons could have 3d edges that were handled at the hardware level, rather than software - thus making for better resource management, and therefore leading to more efficient GUI performance. This may seem minor, and perhaps it is, but I can see how this would have potential.

Once we get up to the 64-pixel Z-plane level of production, I can see widgets being designed that use the Z-plane to provide ancilliary info feedback to the user without requiring any more interaction on the users part than to just move their head and look closer.

I was thinking about this similar "liveliness" aspect of GUI design the other day when playing with http://www.praystation.com/ (excellent web page) - it'd be nice if there were some way to produce a screen that could figure out what you were looking at, perhaps by bouncing something off your retina and doing geometry to get a point of what you're looking at. In the 80's, marketing devices that used lasers to see what you were looking at were used to do market research of TV commercials - it'd be nice to see something like this built into LCD screens, so we could do away with the mouse altogether.

But the thought I had was that, with something like this, the longer you look at the control the more information it could provide you - bringing a "liveliness" aspect to the control that we don't currently have with the static 2d shapes we call user interfaces right now.

Having a 3D screen with a 64-layer Z-plane would be another way to add 'liveliness' to an interface... you could for example build a mixing console that provides you with channel insert information, with amplituded represented in depth.

I'd say 64-layer Z-planes would be the next major step for this company. Get things to that point, and the GUI design world starts to get *really* interesting...

A matter of time

[stienman]

First of all, this should really be labelled 2.5D, not 3D, since it is layered.

It was only a matter of time until people started coming out with displays such as this. Layering 10 transparent LCDs would be good also.

The problems is the bandwidth needed to drive such a beast. Imagine 10 layers (not very many at all) and 1024x768x24 at 60Hz. This means you need a graphics card capable of handling over 12Gb/s of data. In comparison, my 1600x1200 monitor only needs 46Mb/s of bandwidth.

But then, bandwidth is a widespread problem that is getting more attention than other problems. Imagine an HDTV receiver that gets 10 channels synchronized to a 10 layer monitor... 2.5D movies, anyone?

-Adam

Q: How many IBM CPU's does it take to execute a job?
A: Four; three to hold it down, and one to rip its head off.

Dimensional Fading?

[Julius X]

I'm curious if using a display such as this, although the display only creates Two Dimensions, if it would be possible to do the same thing with video the same thing that stereo speakers have done for sound.

With sound, you may only have two speakers(or more) speakers, but using fading effects, you can create the illusion of a sound being anywhere between or even outside the speaker radius.

Would it be possible to do a similar effect using a 2-Dimensional display monitor? Perhaps the "front" dimension has an image(a mouse pointer for example), and while you move it to the "rear" dimension(since there are only two with this display), the front dimension "fades" the image into the rear dimension, creating the illusion that it has actually passed through space to get there, as if there really were more than two dimensions.

Undoubtedly, to create the look of two dimensions, what the technology has required was one "transparent" display on top of another regular display, and all it would require would be a fading transparency effect to accomplish such illusions a demonstrated above.

The possibllities here could be quite intriguing.


-Julius X

Slashdot Security Hole

[stienman]

DO NOT follow the links on the SLASHDOT SECURITY HOLE. It posts a message to this thread under your name (if you are logged in) which is then moderated down by conscientious moderators, which causes you to lose Karma.

Of course, if you WANT to lose Karma, keep clicking on retry...

-Adam

Posted by Adam, who thinks some moderators will moderate this down just to watch others lose Karma...

They don't eat their own dog food?

[stienman]

Unfortunately, it's only 800 x 600 x 2 so far

And on their site:

© 1999 - 2000 Deep Video Imaging Ltd. All Rights Reserved. View Legal Information.
This site is best viewed with a screen resolution of 1024 x 768

-Adam

Join the army, meet interesting people, kill them.