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3-D Monitors From Actual Depth
Klenex writes "True 3-D Visual Effects w/o the use of annoying '3-d' glasses or stereograms. Actual Depth "The Actual Depth monitor is actually two LCD displays stacked on top of each other. The LCD on top displays white transparently, so you can see through to the display beneath it, which is opaque." You need a dual head card or a 2nd video card to drive each display but this seems incredibly cool and it will work with any OS which supports dual monitors w/o any other hardware. Here's TechTV's scoop on the new technology. They even have a link to contact them about a demo in your area. I'd love to see one of these in action even though chances are I would never be able to afford one. Prices start around 6 grand, quite steep."
It's not really for home use yet (give it a few years and it might become standard), and the article lists a price of $6,000.
I've seen the monitor before. The effect isn't impressive. It basically looks like what you'd expect - one lcd layer on top of another, will little illusion of depth.
It will also not work.
The whole idea behind this is that certain pixels on the low layer get shaded by pixels from the upper layer. Now if you have a high enough resolution, and if the pixels fit exactly, then you get 3D (meaning: your left sees something else then your right eye).
This is because the shading pixel is not really on top of the underlying pixel, but a little bit left or right from it. This is the difficult part!
Don't forget that you don't see the depth just because it has two layers: you see it because the upper pixel and the lower pixel together produces two images: 1 for the left eye, 1 for the right!
If you do this with two screens that are not exactly matched you will most likely lose the effect of 3D.
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
Here is an article that explains why this device may be nothing more than two simple overlaid workspaces but not true stereoscopic 3-D. In particular, it says in bold red: "For Stereoscopic-3D you'll need special Stereo-3D software in any case, whether it's photography, film, tv, video or computer software. You will never get a real 3D experience out of standard material. There are products which claim to do this, especially pseudo3D-television devices, but those offerings are bogus! - You can't get 3D out of thin air." From what I have previously heard about stereoscopic vision, and confirmed by what the article says, one needs two slightly different points-of-view of a 3-d object (or simulated points-of-view in case of flat images) for the brain to correctly synthesize the notion of depth. That is why one typically uses glasses with accurately sync'ed shutters (so that one frame is delivered to one eye and the next frame to the other---there are any number of schematics available on the web to roll your own provided the display hardware/software can support this). Alternate techniques for generating stereo vision include polarization techniques, etc.
The manufacturers web site.
An article in the Electronic Engineering Times.
They passed up the excellent opportunity to use a polarized filter on the lcds. With a pair of polarized glasses, you could have true 3D with that setup. That's what they use in the 3D IMAX setups these days (polarized light on a screen that preserves the polarization), and it works amazingly well. You can sit down for hours and watch those with no problem, despite the bs (why their product is better) from the Actual Depth guy. The setup Actual Depth uses is only two layers. As far as 3D gaming goes, there is little to no difference. I don't see the other applications as doing too well either, except perhaps for the medical ones. Even then, though, it's nothing a normal single layered lcd couldn't do with overlays. -Altaic
Last week I saw such a 3d display at an IS conference in Paris. I was in a bit of a rush so I did'nt have time get any details but here are my impressions:
- You do have a "real" depth feel.
- you have to stand at a set distance from the screen (not too far, not too close)
- Don't move your head around too much, it gets blurry.
So yes, I was definatly stumped, but don't go spending your dollars yet is my advice. It's definatly cool but I don't feel it's all that ready either.
how does one change his
Anyhow, the Sharp demo system worked and I wondered what had happened to the idea...
I'm aware of the technique of putting a vertical grating on top of a screen to block every other line from each eye, then drawing the right eye image on the odd lines and the left eye image on the even ones, creating a 3D image. You seem to be talking about something like that, with the front monitor taking over the role of the grating. In that case, I think "This is the difficult part!" is an understatement. Can you explain further? Or are you talking about a different principle?
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
I also remember another device where a mono LCD used a colour CRT as a backlight. At the time (about 1985) this offered high black-and-white resolution, and the ability to display CMYK (inverse RGB, and black), which was quite interesting at the time. The CRT had a thick front plate, so the LCD was clearly 'floating' some way in front of the CRT image.
A holodeck, it ain't. Even quite modest volumes contain an awful lot of voxels. Think how many little cubes you get in a bag of sugar.
Traditional 3d hardware includes 3d accelerator cards, immersive-display goggles, stereoscopic LCD goggles, crystal-ball type volumetric displays, and the (theoretical) realtime hologram projector. But the problems those devices attempt to solve are almost completely distinct from what the ActualDepth display is meant for. (Well, except that a truely effective hologram projector could emulate any other display technology...)
The point of ActualDepth is to allow your computer to present you more visual information in the same space. If you run traditional software that's not aware of the special screen layout, you can just use the multi-monitor feature of the OS's gui system (in X11 they call it Xinerama) to assign some windows to the front screen and some to the back. That way you can look at both of them at once, and for instance can read the online manual for a game at the same time you play it full screen, or operate a 3d-modeller in the classic 4-way parellel projection while a textured preview of the object sits on the back display. Anything that you'd do with dual-monitors, you can do with this, but using less physical real estate, and, more importantly, with less time to focus your vision from one to the other. Both screens are centered in your field of view at the same time, so there's no looking back and forth nessecary.
It's likely that without modifications, your GUI interface will only allow the mouse to switch between screens by you dragging it across one edge of the screens, where it considers them seamed together. That is irritating and unintuitive, so you'd want to use one screen as more of a read-only device, showing useful data but rarely needing interaction.
Elsewhere, someone asked if this effect can be emulated in software just by alpha-blending on image on top of another. You could try this, but it wouldn't really work. At the points where the foreground image is solid (thick black text), the background will be completely obscured. But with "actual depth" between the displays, the stereo-graphic effect of dual-eyeballs comes into play. Assuming the foreground image is mostly line-art or text and doesn't consist of large regions of solid color, then for every pixel in the background image, at least one of your eyeballs will have an unobstructed line of sight to it. You remain aware of the contents of both displays with no additional perceptual effort.
The device I tested had a touch screen attached in front, and the window-manager (well, Microsoft Windows(tm)) was configured so that a single-click on a titlebar would shift a window 1024 pixels left or right, effectively toggling it between the front and back displays.
To begin to recoup some of the enormous pricetag for ActualDepth hardware, though, you'd need to run software that's aware of the display's special characteristics. (The code doesn't need to link any special drivers or new APIs, but it does need to be aware that graphics drawn at (X-1024,Y) will appear floating over (X,Y)).
Essentially what the application should do is allocate one display for data, and one for meta-data. That is, if you're word-processing a document, the back display should always give a WYSIWYG preview of the output, and the front display should present all the filenames, font names, editing markup (including those automatically-generated spellchecker warning scribbles), section breaks, margin, column boundaries, etc.
I'd really like to see what user-interface innovations would pop out if the programming public got to play with these monitors for a while, but at the current price, that's just not going to happen. (ActualDepth should sponsor some free-software authors to modify their code to exploit their displays- until they get some sample applications out there, potential users won't understand the benefits).
I saw some of them of CeBIT, and they're pretty cool, although your eyes begin to hurt after a few minutes of watching. So, IMO it's a technology not yet ready for the end-user market.
A monkey is doing the real work for me.
I spoke with a friend a while back about some work with multiple plane 3D display units a while back. Using Google, I found a few people that have multiple (arbitrary?) layers of depth using lasers. Yes, this is different than LCD and functionally more difficult, but interesting nonetheless.
/. a while back.)
The idea is to send multiple beams into a glass cube. When beams interesct, they flouresce. By controling the way the beams enter the cube, one can create a volumetric display. There is an article here about some work done by some Stanford folks, and a somewhat related presentation here from some Berkeley folks.
(also searching, I found the there was an article about Actual Depth here on