Slashdot Mirror
18-Inch 3D LCD Screens
Rob Polyn sent in a story about a new 18" LCD screen using DTI to simulate 3D. An excerpt describes the technique:
"The second approach to true 3D animation is known as autostereoscopy (which DTI monitors utilize). In this method, two solid and unyielding images are produced for the user to view. These images are merged together, and if viewed by one eye, will appear to be two overlapping images, which don?t quite merge together correctly. However, when viewed with two eyes, autostereoscopy can produce vivid lifelike 3D images."
of pornography awaits! Chalk another one up for science! Whoo-hoo!
Imagine a beowolf cluster of these...
This kind of display effectively displays a stereo pair without the need of special glasses etc. Every example I have ever seen requires the viewer to be in a relatively constrained angle to the monitor to receive a true effect. The best 3d I have experienced was a pair of polarized projectors (one horizontal, one vertical) with a passive set of polarized glasses, a camera would track the viewers motion and redraw the scene appropriately, the affect was very much like looking through a window.
Does any one know of any other 3d visualization system being developed, any links would be most appreciated.
Unfortunately, this concept has proven to create problems for individuals prone to epilepsy or similar medical conditions. The chance of exciting or aggravating a condition such as this increases if the images are of an autostereoscopy, but are also flashing. Another area of concern is that it seems to cause headaches in many individuals, also.
The goal would be creating a system capable of delivering images to multiple viewers at their respective locations. Current technologies allow a single viewer with a 30-degree viewzone. This may or may not be practical with the current design. Also, another hurdle is producing full color 3-D and proper occlusion (depth cue allowing an object in the foreground to block the ones behind it).
Thanks.
Domenic R. Merenda
Director of Strategic Business Development
BeOpen.com
$11,000? Yikes!
LCD is gonna be cool. My dream is for a hardware standard puts 12" LCD displays in the stores for cheap, like $100 or less. Each of these LCD displays could function as an independant monitor, but the coolness would be that you could take the plastic edges off and expose the LCD going all the way to the edge, and there would be an androgynous connector running down each side that could plug into another identical LCD. Take four of these and plug them together in a square, and you have a 24"x24" monitor. You could go out and buy a couple panels every paycheck until eventually you were satisfied with the size or had a monitor-wall to run Quake on.
This would work for TVs as well, and could really make it easier to get big TVs without needing to spend so much money at once.
Just an idea...
I wonder how these work for people who are cross-eyed?
thank you.
thank you.
i took a bitchslapping for natalie portman!!
-Earthman
Earthman
Say it to me face w/ out wasting space...
I see. So wouldn't the 3D card be a better place to do this? Then you don't need some expensive monitor. Any monitor would do.. Or maybe it would be limited to flat (CRT/LCD) monitors. Either way, seems like an odd way to go about it.
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
You can find a list of similar products here. Another interesting link is the Spatial Imaging Group at the MIT Media Lab.
Given one hour to live, the student replied: "I'd spend it with professor FP who can make an hour seem like a lifetime."
In this method, two solid and unyielding images are produced for the user to view. These images are merged together, and if viewed by one eye, will appear to be two overlapping images, which don?t quite merge together correctly. However, when viewed with two eyes, autostereoscopy can produce vivid lifelike 3D images.
That's just not an explanation. But, I figure, it's just a review by some graphics fans. So I checked the company's website. (Which barely works. A peek at the image directory got me this. I guess we know they're hosting on a Mac, huh?) Their FAQ, in response to "Q: I am wondering how your display works?" links to http://www.dti3d.com/dev/, which is not especially useful. I downloaded the developer's package. The readme says:
dti_vw libray diretory has source files for our driver.
dti_vw app directory has sample file for how to use our libray in a application program.
Our library is so simple and easy to use.
There for this sample is good enough to know how our library works.
Our library make a application can communicate between a computer and our unit.
If we change our the communication method and way, we will update immediately.
I gotta be honest: This all looks pretty sketchy. Has anybody seen/used one of these? I'm not convinced that this thing is legit. I don't have the skills to be able to read the code to figure out how all of this works. But "view with two eyes" just ain't gonna cut it for this crowd.
-Waldo
The monitor works by providing 2 images, one for each eye. As the article mentioned, if your program supports it, each eye will get a slightly different image, which provides the 3d effect. Otherwise, each eye will get a copy of the same image. I would guess this is done by angling alternate pixels slightly towards each eye.
You can actually try this effect on your own monitors. Just open 2 copies of any picture, and put them next to each other. Now, look at the pictures thru the monitor, as if they were far away. Eventually, you will be able to merge the 2 pictures together, while everything else goes a bit blurry. When that happens, you are looking at one picture thru each eye. You should be able to get a slightly 3d effect depending on what kind of picture you chose.
You can get 3d cameras that take a picture from 2 angles, and use a special viewer that forces each eye to look at its corresponding picture to view them. The innovation with this monitor is just allowing you to view it without using any special viewers. Of course, the review said that there were some problems with dimness and vertical lines in 3d mode, but these should be easy to fix.
---
One of the links I mentioned refers to the Richmond Holographic Studios. One very nice feature of this technology is that a wider viewing angle is supported allowing multiple people to see the same image. This might not be so important for games, but for architectural rendering or other 'real work' (that is unless you work for a gaming company ;-), this may be vital.
I suspect that there are some strong negatives and would love to read comments from anyone who knows more.
Given one hour to live, the student replied: "I'd spend it with professor FP who can make an hour seem like a lifetime."
.- CitizenC (User Info)
That's strange. The testers explicitely say that they tested the screen with non-3d-capable game (quake 3)... No wonder that absolutely no 3d effect is to be expected.
There's some conflict on this. The author says:
Switching from 2D to 3D mode is a breeze--simply press the "3D" button on the front control panel on the monitor, and one has virtually automatically switched modes.
I simply don't believe that. There was never even a mention of installing drivers in the installation portion of the article. Can you imagine the processing power that would go into turning a 2D image into 3D? It must be quite remarkable. I'd think at least a software upgrade would be in order.
The author goes on:
However, when comparing Doom, a game which has stereoscopy, with Quake 3, a game which doesn't, the differences were negligible. This could potentially be because of Quake 3's increased detail, but could also be because our eyes simply couldn't tell the minute difference. Quake 3 basically uses the exact same image being displayed twice, while Doom uses two images which slightly differ in viewing angle. Perhaps Doom produced a slightly more 3D "feel" to it, but Quake 3 also had a similar effect.
"A game which has stereoscopy"? I don't understand -- could somebody explain? Doom was made to be viewed in 3D monitors?
Then the author says:
Though full stereoscopy is not widely supported by many recent games, DTI's 3D mode is still useable in games such as Quake 3, and produces results very similar to games that fully support stereoscopy.
So....it *is* 3D? I don't get it. I thought Quake 3 didn't look 3D?
This is all pretty sketchy.
-Waldo
It works with backlighting. There is a striped mask over the lamp, and the lamp is positioned a little distance behind the liquid crystals. If you draw a lines in 3D space from a light stripe to each eye, each line will pass through different pixel elements on the way.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
after a little more research i came up with this Philips research paper. (be sure to look at the nice diagrams in the slides).
the gist of it is this: much like 3d postcards, they use a grid of cylindrical lens over the LCD panel. each lens covers a specified number of real LCD pixels, 4 being a common number. since the lens is constructed to have the LCD pixel be at the focal point, when you look at the screen through the lens your eye will be directed towards one of the 4 pixels and not the others. thus the lens has turned 4 real pixels into one 3d pixel. (and dropped your resolution to 1/4th!) if you shift your viewing angle then you will look at a different one. if, like many people, you have two eyeballs which are separated by a few inches, then each eye will see a different image.
another way of thinking about it is to imagine that four zones of images are being projected out from each pixel to your eyes. as long as your eyes are in separate zones then you are okay. this is the case if you are sitting at normal reading distance. but if you get too far away (or have a head the size of a mouse) then your eyes will end up in the same zone and you lose the 3d effect.
philips has also done some innovative work to even out the resolution loss and improve the viewing angle.
- joshy
after reading how it works i now understand why it's so dim. if there is a 4:1 ratio of real pixels to 3d pixels, then each eye is only getting 1/4 the light it used to. guess they are going to have to beef up that backlight. then you can switch back to 2d and have a blinding image reflect of your face, just like in the movies. :)
Prop me up beside the jukebox if I die.
.. as I am blind in one eye. As well as fearing wearable computers for the same reason. How many other "disabled" people out there wonder how we will adapt to the toys of the "perfects" in the future of computing???
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
These exact monitors were slashdotted back in February. http://slashdot.org/articles/00/02/19/1217254.shtm l Come on guys, this is really getting lame.
Trouble is: when looking at realistic scenes, motion parallax (i.e., what happens to the image when you move your head slightly), not stereo, is probably the primary motion cue. Stereo cues in the kinds of scenes you get from 3D games are likely more confusing than immersive, since they often simply reinforce the impression of looking at a tiny, toy-like scene. If you want that kind of appearance, you can already get simple LCD shutter glasses for relatively little money, but they probably haven't caught on for a reason.
The best solution for immersive 3D games is head mounted displays, which give you excellent head tracking and motion parallax. The next most important cue is likely peripheral vision, which is a bigger engineering challenge. Once you have a head-mounted display, adding stereo is technically easy (but increases the cost somewhat since you need two displays).
Though full stereoscopy is not widely supported by many recent games, DTI's 3D mode is still useable in games such as Quake 3, and produces results very similar to games that fully support stereoscopy.
Okay, how can this possibly work? How can the driver or anything else possibly guess the distances at which we're supposed to perceive different objects?
I could see how they could produce some uniform 3D effect, such as making the top of the screen appear farther away than the bottom, but how can they do anything which relates to the contents of the image?
However, when comparing Doom, a game which has stereoscopy, with Quake 3, a game which doesn't, the differences were negligible.
Right. This really makes me think any benefits are largely imagined.
/* The beatings will continue until morale improves. */
However, I imagine it is a fairly restrictive veiwing angle and thusnot that great if you want to show something to others.
It's not all THAT bad. (If this is what I think it is) there are a SET of narrow angles from the screen where the stereo effect works correctly.
They're bisected by another set of angles where the depth is reversed, and the space between the clean images (normal or reversed depth) has regions where the two images wash into each other.
So a person can sit closely beside you (distance from your right eye to his left is one, three, five, etc. times the distance between your eyes) and simultaneously see the same image.
The main problems are...
- You have to be at distance from the screen equal to a constant times the spacing between your eyes (plus or minus maybe 20%) to get the effect. At the wrong distance the images for each eye also bleed into the other eye, giving you a triple image - the one you want, plus two single-eye ghosts.
- Images TOO far ahead of or behind the screen will give you eyestrain - because your eyes have to focus at the distance to the screen, but the paralax depth cue says the object is far from the screen. So your eye muscles hunt and get tired.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
...a monitor screen covered with tiny projectors (projexels?) instead of pixels. What do I mean? Each projexel projects a complete image. If you darkened the room, turned off all the projexels except one and held a piece of white paper up to the screen, you would see a complete image of the scene projected on the white paper.
In other words, active holography. Now, this would require a lot of bandwidth if you did it the stupid way. OTOH, it seems you could exploit coherency in the image to a great deal in order to avoid having to retransmit data that doesn't change too often from projexel to projexel. Possibly, something as simple as run-length encoding could do this.
I'm glossing over a lot of details here. This is an idea I've had for quite a while. Also, if anybody tries to patent active holography, they can bugger off. You saw it here first.
BTW, Theirs is $11,000. I'll make you one of mine for $11,000,000.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Stereo games (such as Doom) already generate left- and right-eye data. Non-stereo games (such as Quake 3) could have depth = 1/luminance; dim things are farther away.
Will I retire or break 10K?
This is not true. Your brain relies far more on parallax, "smaller is farther" and "stuff in front blocks out stuff behind."
You use binocular difference with close objects, within a few feet distance. Beyond that, binocular doesn't enter into it.
--
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
That's interesting.. so, that would mean the image effectively "hits" the screen and can't go any farther back, so wouldn't that kill some of the depth of the image and put things on the same plane that aren't mean to be?
Actually the images can appear to be anywhere from the end of your nose to infinity (and beyond! B-) ). It's just that if they're far from the screen in either direction your eyes will try to focus on the apparent location, and end up DEfocussing the image (which is actually on the screen, not at the apparent depth). This can lead to eyestrain.
A hack to avoid it is to compensate with glasses. If the images of interest are mainly far behind the screen, for instance, wear reading glasses. That will focus an image that is actually at reading distance when your eyes try to focus far away.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way