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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."
What would make this even better would be a way to easily rotate the "cube" representing your screen: you could have six applications open, each maximized on one plane, then just rotate the cube with a joystick to quickly switch around, or position it such that you can view parts of 2 or 3 apps at once.
But how would one implement a 3-D mouse?
...what effect a 3D display like this might have in terms of eye strain. If something like this were to become really widespread and used for day to day applications and GUIs, it's something to consider. Anyone out there that has worked with similar displays have an answer?
From reading the article, I suspect that it has something to do with either increasing the number of transparent electrodes on the front face of the display panel, or changing how they're energized in relationship to the electrodes on the rear face of the panel, to change the liquid crystal alignment angles so that the viewing cone for pixels gets shifted. This would result in a 50% loss of resolution in the horizontal axis, though. The article does make a point about how the display won't have a reduced resolution in 2D mode, so the 3D functionality has to be achieved by a mechanism that restricts pixels to being viewed by a specific eye.
This is really neat, but if you're running a word processor or a spreadsheet, will you ever care? If you're simulating something n-dimensional, what good is 3d? This seems like a solution in search of a problem. Of course, so was the laser.
See what I've been reading.
I don't think it will take the porn insdustry too long .... lets face it, big boobs sell ... big 3D boobs in your face will sell better! (and seem even BIGGER! Bigger boobs = bigger profits!)
:)
As for games, this may take a bit longer since game programing companies count on mass distribution to make a reasonable profit. Since this 3D screen will be somewhat pricey for a few years, it may take a while before games begin to widely use this technology (of course, there will be one or two crappy games that will try to be the "first to the market", but I doubt anything good will be available for atleast a year or two).
Besdies, does anyone have a driver for this yet?
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
...Pretty good. I was lucky enough to get a demo of this technology a couple of years ago when some Sharp guys visited a "certain company that makes processors for a certain company named after a fruit" that I happened to be working at. The effect is very good, however as they noted you have to be sitting at a very specific distance, and dead in front of the screen (at least as of two years ago). This is not too big a deal for games, at least if you're like me and you go into a 3d shooter trance as soon as Quake or the like boots up. However, for CAD type tasks I image keeping your head still for hours on end would be a bit aggravating.
Personally, if they could sell it for only 50% more than a normal moniter, and if the LCD could refresh fast enough w/o ghosting for 3d shooters, I'd pick one up in a heartbeat.