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3D w/o Goggles
jamner writes "A Yahoo Daily News article mentions that computer users may soon be able to work on screens with displays that give the appearance of being three dimensional. The company is Deep Visual Imaging at www.actualdepth.com and their products page." They accomplish it by layering LCDs, so while its not going to fake a true 3d workspace, the depth would still add substantially to many applications (well, it would make quake cooler, and I'm sure desktop apps could benefit, but I suspect the medical industry has more important uses).
These are:
In other words, the logical technology+market progression would be to expand HMD to encompass 2D and 3D needs in a lower-cost & commercially viable manner, rather than push excessively specialized hardware. The perfect package for me would include a set of relatively high-resolution (1280x1024) 2D goggles with a motion sensor configured for 3+ desktops, and a Datahand keyboard pair. Those interested in a 3D configuration would need only make a software reconfiguration to adjust the motion sensor input to provide perspective based on user motion, rather than physically emulating single-position stereoscopic vision. For me, it'd be far nicer than the multiple-monitor setup I have now, and would fit in a locked drawer when I wasn't using it.
A layered 3D desktop monitor would be kinda nifty, but a minor usability advance compared to a much more flexible HMD. But I suppose I'll have to be happy with the castoffs from the gamers...
J
I think not...(*poof*)
Cute idea. But here's a much more interesting autostereoscopic display from 4D-Vision. Available in either 15" LCD or 50" plasma. What you get is 8 different viewpoints displayed through a special grille that reveals only one view to each eye. The result is a stereo image, wihout glasses, and you're free to walk around the room. The thing actually works. They were on display at NAB in Las Vegas, they look not perfect but definitely promising...
I first heard reports of imminent 3D without goggles when I was in secondary school. Since then I've been to university (twice) and been working for three years since then.
So excuse my scepticism if I say that I'll believe it when I see it.
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More precisely, without "glasses".
Back in the mid-late 80's (perhaps earlier?) I remember watching an episode of "That's Incredible", about these two guys (may have been professors?) at a university or college (in California, I believe) who created a form of 3D that didn't require glasses.
In fact, it didn't require both eyes! That's right, you could close one eye while viewing it, and it would still look 3D!
They broadcasted a few video clips of the effect on the episode of "That's Incredible", and it really was amazing. The two dudes who came up with the system said they did it with some kind of "black box" device they had created, that could be inserted between a video source and the display, and it would "make" the image 3D. You could tape the clips, and it woud still look fine if you played them back.
At the time, I was stunned - still am - that such an effect could be produced. I remember that the images were kind of shakey (the inventors of the process admitted this on the broadcast), but not annoyingly so. I remember taping the episode, but I have since lost the tape. I remember trying to play it back, closing one eye - and yes, it all worked! There was depth to the image (this was the one "problem" with it - the depth went "into" the screen, not out of it - so it looked like you were looking through a window - but it was still nice).
Has anybody heard of these men, the episode, what the technique was, what happened to them, how it works, etc? I have seen many strange ways to get 3D - but this one has always taken the cake as the strangest, since it relies on a fundamental brain process to trick the brain into seeing 3D (even with one eye!!!)...
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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
Since the LCD is 24 bpp at 60 hz, don't you think you should figure the same for your monitor?
1600x1200 = 1,920,000 pixels
1,920,000 pixels * 24 bits/pixel = 46,080,000 bits
46,080,000 bits * 60 Hz = 2.76 Gb/s (where Gb = 1,000,000,000 bits)
I don't know where you got your 46Mb/s from, but it's quite a bit off. Rudimentary logic tells us that 10 layers of a lower resolution is going to take less than 10 times the bandwidth, not the 200+ times the bandwidth you claim.
Actually, the unit is essentially two seperate LCD screens combined into one and (i believe) will work with an off-the-shelf dual-monitor video card. The connections are simply 2 x HD15 RGB Analogue (2 standard monitor connectors). So, you could actually use it on any OS without any drivers or anything. With drivers, the thing will really be able to shine... adding things like foreground and background buttons in OSes, popup windows in applications that actually popup, simulated 3d effects within games, medical apps, imaging stuff, geographical stuff, etc, etc. There are many possible applications. Actual Depth did have to do some work to get it to work nicely, since we need a truely clear LCD in the foreground (which is 6bit) so it doesn't disrupt the background (or main) LCD which is 24bit. Initially, the company plans on using it for marketting kiosks and the like (since it'll definitely catch people's eyes), but I anticipate a quick move into arcade game units, commercial applications and, eventually, home applications. My friend who has seen one says it is quite cool looking.
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Having taken part in virtual reality testing, I'd hate to see what this would do to the workplace.
We had enough people barfing just trying to find thier way around a room. Could you imagine how bad it will be when these things actually hit the market affordably?
-Si
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I didn't see a clear description--is this limited to only foreground and background planes, or do they use a technique for tricking the eye to see intermediate depths? I can't imaging that a simple foreground/background display would be flashy enough to justify the cost for the majority of users.
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I'm impressed that a company called DVI could be so high-tex.
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Has anyone come out with a decent way to point in 3D space? Mouses/mice/whatever that you can use to manipulate 3D images in CAD would be handy, for example.
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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...
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