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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*)
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.
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
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.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
I'm impressed that a company called DVI could be so high-tex.
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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...
The starfield screensaver is reborn!