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3D LCD Display
Powerdog writes "After 10 years of lab work, Sharp has developed a 3D LCD display that works without glasses. They expect to use the displays in games at first, and expand into PCs and TVs. Production begins in a few months and products using them should be shipping in early 2003. Naturally, I just bought two 2D LCD displays for my home office two weeks ago."
http://www.dti3d.com/
d e. 1.shtml
http://www.neurokoptics.com/press/archive/giga.
The P.R. Gives some indication of how it works:
The article doesn't say how the 3D effect is done, but I would venture a guess: Lenticulars.
;- )
I used to work for a company that did a bit of research in lenticular software, its pretty neat, but a bitch to align properly.
And we all wanted a lenticular screen
(For those who don't know what lenticulars are, they are those plastick "ribbed" images you often got in cracker jacks boxes and on some toys, erroneously called holograms by 99.9% of the population.)
You can't take the sky from me...
Here it is at Sharp's site
Dimension Technologies makes products which, by the looks of their technology, are identical to Sharp's "new" breakthrough. DTI's made their first display with this technique years ago, and claims to have several patents. Can anyone show how Sharp is not infringing on DTI's patents?
WRONG.
That would only work if you were able to know when the light being reflected from said objects originated. Given that light, in most cases, is a constant element (it's not frequently changing, i.e. stopping and starting, like a strobe), and given that you are not the originator of the light and you have no way of being sure which received photon (or group thereof) is (are) supposed to be synchronous in origin/reflection with which other photon, your explanation for depth perception/3D vision is not possible. 3-D vision actually relies on a number of processing tricks in the brain. You do the footwork, but the most commonly cited ones are: motion parallax, relative size, occlusion and binocular disparity.
Active sonar works the way you describe, as does radar. Human vision does not. Think of it in terms of active vs. passive processes. An active system is one that originates some signal and meters the response. A passive system makes sense of the existing signals whose origins/timings are not often known. Human vision is a passive system...
by reading a post later (which is the original press release) it is clear that there is a 50% loss of resolution in the horizontal axis.
The press release on yahoo says that this 2d/3d display has the same resolution as a 2d-only display, not that in 2d and 3d it has the same resolution (which I thought I saw when reading it the first time)
Basically this display works the same as the 'older' 3d LCDs when 3d, but the parallax blocker is not physical, it's switchable, so the screen can be flipped to 2d when needed and not forcibly left in 3d like the others.
-- the cake is a lie
i will go with a volumetric display any day of the week.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
the japanese site provides a little bit more detail - essentially there's a microfine light grill in front of the lcd display bending the perceived light between the left and right eye creating a stereoscopic view much like 3d glasses. i've created a link to the sites through babelfish for those of you who can't read japanese. (the translation isn't perfect, but it's enough to get the gyst of things)
s harp.htm
Sharp's News Release : http://www.sharp.co.jp/corporate/news/020927.html
Impress Press Release : http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/pc/docs/2002/0927/
If anyone's interested, here's a babelfish'd link to a Japanese page with some pictures of the unit and more information. Looks pretty cool to me.
I bought a Geforce2 from MSI with an Elsa 3D Revelator bundle. The bundle contained polarised shutter glasses (dongled onto the VGA cable) that sync up to your CRT monitor's refresh rate, opening each eye in turn. The drivers show you a different picture for each eye.
These things rock. Almost all OpenGL or D3D games work with them. It's very useful for platformers where you have to judge distances to jump accurately (like in American McGee's Alice). It's good for heaving grenades accurately (like in Counter-Strike, Grand Theft Auto 3). It's good for flight simulators, where judging distance can be crucial (like in MS Combat Flight Simulator). Driving is great (!) in 3D.
If it doesn't actually improve the way you play certain games, then eye-candy alone makes it worth it.
You can do some weird things with stereoscopic gaming. Using GLDoom (or the like), you can play Doom in stereo. Using an emulator like ePSXe, you can play console games in stereo.
There can be some problems. Some games use 2D elements with their 3D games. GTA3, for example, has 3D cars, people, and architecture; but it uses 2D for most particles. This means that fire, smoke, and some debris appear at screen depth (along with the 2D hud elements).
The only really practical use of this system right now is games (is that really practical?). There are no workable 3D desktops/web browsers/word processors/etc., so the Snow Crash/Johnny Mnemonic metaverse-thingy isn't quite there yet. However, there is existing technology lying around to do it today.
Another thing: These glasses are CHEAP! (