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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."
My monitor is already 3D, it is a huge 3D box.
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.3d
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.
Two layers doesn't seem very deep. Wouldn't it take a few more to create something resembling 3 dimensions?
It is amazing how effective parallax (a simple animation technique where planes further away move more slowly than closer planes) is at creating a 3D feeling. It would be even more effective on this type of monitor.
I think this could be extremely effective for fast games, although I agree that two planes probably isn't enough. Three might do it though.
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
I doubt that you can achieve the same amount of 3-dimensional impression using such a simple approach as, say, a CAVE with motion tracking. For example, how do they display objects with surfaces orthogonal to the two LCD screens?
Perhaps because LCDs are already polarised.
Really.
It's true.
woof.
Yes, I know how LCDs work, so bear with me - instead of using filters that polarize every pixel the same way, one could use filters that polarized every other line at 90 degrees to the previous. Now, manufacturing such filters and fitting them to LCDs is more expensive than current LCDs, but the advantage is that a simple pair of polarizing glasses (with one lens polarizing at 90 degrees to the other) would enable stereoscopic viewing of the LCD from any distance within the field of view of the LCD. I believe there is a company out there already claiming to have developed such displays, but I don't recall the name - they were touting their micropolarizer filter technology, anyhow, which is the hard part of making such a display.
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
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
"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."
The two layers isn't to produce a stereoscopic effect, they're an interface feature. The demo I saw was a guy using Windows with this device. The screen was touch sensitive and he could drag windows around with his finger and then push it into the background layer. You could get a lot more things on the screen with this device because the added layer gave you something to focus on.
They weren't marketing it as a 'watch tv in 3D!' gadget like everybody else, they were marketing it as a practical interface to Windows. (I think I remember the rep saying it'd work on any os, the demo was Windows though.)
Unfortunately, the article that Slashdot posted was misleading by calling it '3D'. It would be better to describe it as 'dual monitors with the form factor of only one monitor.'
Just to make a point, don't pass judgement on this device until you actually see it in practice. I was skeptical of it too until I saw the demonstration. Compared to the '3D Tvs' they had around the show, this thing was by far the clearest. The 'stereoscopic' monitors they had around the show floor were headache inducing. The slightest movement and everything would warble a bit. At least this particular monitor stayed clear.
"Derp de derp."