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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."
Double D's are more than enough on my LCD screen, thank you.
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the article doesn't really have any technical details, I'm curious to see what principle this screen operates on, and what makes it different technologically from the previous 3d LCD screens we've already seen (I think it's the 2d/3d nature of the screen without loss of resolution, as the article says, but I'd like to know how they get this to work)
-- the cake is a lie
I didn't see any indication in the article that Sharp had developed a 3D LCD. As far as I can tell, Sharp has developed a 3D flat screen.
http://www.dti3d.com/
d e. 1.shtml
http://www.neurokoptics.com/press/archive/giga.
Aside from gaming, what are we planning to use these for?
I can see the use in design, nd maybe medical imaging? Any others?
I'm not disparaging the technology, or those who want one (I do) I'm genuinely curious . . . 3D is one of those "cool" things we've all had on our minds since watching our godzilla 3d movie as a kid, now that it's "here" how are we going to make use of the technology?
\Drew National Data Director, John Edwards for President
When you actually *make* something, it's not a mystery business plan. You say, wittily:
1. Create 3D LCD that works without glasses.
2. ???
3. Profit!!!
In this case, ??? can be expressed as:
"Sell 3D LCD for more than it cost to manufacture it."
Okay?
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?
The P.R. Gives some indication of how it works:
Mod this up!
Funniest troll I've read in a long time.
Objects are perceived as the same distance away when light takes the same amount of time to traverse from each of the objects.
That's great! Objects appear further away because it takes longer for the light from them to reach my eyes.
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...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?
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...
Legs: [gasps] I'm seeing double here: four Krustys!
Most folk'll never lose a toe, and then again some folk'll...
Sharp has developed a 3D LCD display that works without glasses
I applaud Sharp's achievements in this exciting area of optical technology, but if the display only works without glasses, this eliminates a good percentage of computer users who, like myself, have to wear glasses.
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Yes, you're right, but you forgot one significant detail: the software solution.
If you have a sufficiently efficient 3d card that has an incredibly low latency, you can emulate the long light traversal time by simply just sending the light from the deep objects *later*. This probably would require the logic to be integrated to the LCD screen itself because the signal latency in the vga cable from the sound card to the monitor in itself is too high. I'm unsure whether Sharp used this in their monitors, it'll be interesting to see when they give out more details.
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?
Can I have some of what you're smoking? Sounds like it must be pretty good stuff.
Unix is user friendly, it's just selective about who its friends are.
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.
How come there weren't any pictures on the linked site? It would be nice to see
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...
I'm surprised this took so long, now that I think about it some. The illusion of depth on a flat surface can be achieved by forcing each eye to receive a different image, effectively tricking the eye into believing that what it's seeing has depth.
Try looking very closely at an LCD monitor some time, like within 4 inches. Due to the narrow viewing angle present on LCDs, each eye will see a different view of the same pixels. If you angle your head just right, you can perceive something resembling depth, though without any real control. I wouldn't think it would be that difficult to engineer a panel to make use of this effect.
Then again, my eyes are pretty jacked up, what with me having severe macular degeneration and some pretty crappy color vision. The experiment may also work a little better if you drink a bottle of 'tussin right before viewing.
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
You know, like, to grasp the rounded, perky ... uhhhh ...
TyZone
Two words : CAD/CAE
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
i will go with a volumetric display any day of the week.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
A nice explanation.
f
http://sharp-world.com/corporate/news/020927-1.gi
Oh, I can't help quoting you because everything that you said rings true
Medical imaging.
You want the neurosurgeon to have a REAL GOOD idea of the spacial relationships of things in your brain before your skull gets cracked open.
Education is the silver bullet.
Parallax occlusion might be the most economically feasible technology at the moment, but it's not that great. You can only see a good 3D image from certain angles and certain distances from the screen. Given a "Switching LCD" (their terminology) with a fine enough vertical grating (i.e. considerably higher than the horizontal resolution of the display LCD), and given a tracking system on the monitor (IR sensor or even a camera with position sensing software) that can sense where the viewer (singular!) is, the switching LCD could adjust the occlusion dynamically to make a sweet spot follow the viewer. This could also be done mechanically I guess, using a simple static grating, by moving the switching LCD left and right and forward and back as needed. This wouldn't work so well at the edges though, or anywhere the viewing angle deviates considerably from 90 degrees.
I'm still hoping to be able to buy a holographic monitor within my lifetime.
In the same way that black-and-white TVs switched to color, we really think displays are going to switch to 3-D," Stephen Bold, managing director of Sharp Laboratories of Europe Ltd, said after a news conference.
I hate to throw the wet blanket over 10 years of research, but I got news for both the pointy heads and the marketing department: Going from being able to have friends over to watch TV from different positions around the room to requiring everyone to look at a certain angle (and probably occupy the same space at the same time) is NOT an improvement over existing displays, 3D notwithstanding.
There might be specialized applications, but to compare this to the change from B&W to color television is absolutely absurd.
Call me when you have THREE DIMENSIONAL television that I can see from ANY angle. Then I'll be interested. I'll actually be impressed when I can walk around the image and see different angles.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Go see Space Station in IMAX 3D.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Nothing personal, but that joke was officially dead the second I used it, which was at least four weeks ago.
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
I first ran into this notion in the sequel to James T. Culbertson's _The Minds of Robots_. The earlier book was quite interesting and threatened to actually solve some basic problems in the origins of consciousness. The sequel (I forget the title offhand) was a true pseudo-scientific excursion in which he presents this exact suggestion that depth perception results from the distance traveled by light rays reflecting off of an object. His earlier book relies on relativistic effects applied to signals traveling through the nervous system whose points of origin are light rays bouncing off of objects in external reality, so it wasn't a great leap for him. I doubt whether Culbertson actually invented the idea. It sounds like something out of the late Middle Ages, just prior to the Renaissance. Galileo shot most of those ideas to pieces, but some folks just never get the message.
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
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 just play one on slashdot...
Damn, I have got to remember that one. ROFL.
FWIW, You didn't sound like an Asshole to me, just a dotter.
"The words of the prophets are written on the Slashdot walls."
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?
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The screens can only be seen in 3-D from certain angles and distances, however, and a "sweet spot indicator" -- a small bar at the lower end of the screen -- appears solid black when the viewer is at an optimum position for 3-D.
Get out of the sweet spot runt!
MOOOOMMMMMM!
Stupider like a fox! - H.S.
Who knows. But, I can tell you that after watching the Doom 3 trailer, I swore I would never play that game after 8pm with the lights out. If this technology was available to me at release time and the game supported, I'd likely be too frightened to install it.
"The words of the prophets are written on the Slashdot walls."
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! (
Sharp has developed a 3D LCD display that works without glasses.
I have a 3D LCD display at home that works great with or without glasses.
Now what would really be cool, is a 2D LCD display... I mean, sure they're already pretty thin.....
oh wait.... I'm supposed to read the article first, aren't I?
I'll have something intelligent to add one of these days...
...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.
LCD display? Liquid Crystal Display display?
michael, you're going on The List, along with people who say "SAT Test" and "HIV Virus" and "GUI Interface" and "ATM Machine" and "NIC Card".
"Naturally, I just bought two 2D LCD displays for my home office two weeks ago."
2 x 2D = 4D
4D > 3D
QED
"The screens can only be seen in 3-D from certain angles and distances, however, and a "sweet spot indicator" -- a small bar at the lower end of the screen -- appears solid black when the viewer is at an optimum position for 3-D."
Right... this is basically the same idea as many kind of "3D without glasses" dating back to the turn of the century. Including the well-known lenticular displays.
In effect it creates a pair of invisible "virtual glasses" in the air and you have to line up your head with them to see the effect. The problem is that your eyes are only 3 inches apart, so even ideally, at the VERY BEST you only have 3 inches of freedom to move your head before the left eye moves into the right-eye "virtual lens" or vice versa. In real life, the image is likely to blur or darken or otherwise turn funny if you move your head less than that.
This is going to create neck cramps like you won't believe, and all sorts of other irritations.
It's one thing to have a gimmick on a cereal package, or a poster, that grabs your attention for a few seconds. It's quite another to look at it for as long as you'd look at a computer screen.
Consumer cameras that produce lenticular "view-without-glasses" prints have been available on and off for decades. They have NEVER been popular.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
The parallax blocker is a mechanical filter fitted by the user to the display. It most definitely is switchable.
RTFWP
Depending on how many different images it could show under each parallax barrier, you could easily generate volumetric displays.
I do this all the time with Lenticular Images. The trick is that the parallax barrier (or lens in the case of lenticular) blocks more than 50% of the display beneath at a time. If it blocks 80%, and shows 20% to each eye, there's room for 5 separate "views". By moving your head side-to-side, you see different stereo pairs, effectively seeing "around" objects on the screen.
By blocking 90%, showing 10% to each eye, you suddenly allow 10 views.
The problem is that by blocking 90% and showing 10%, your screen is now only 10% as bright as it used to be.
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
What you're describing requires true "3D". What this device does is much more like "2.5D" - two dimensional images, with a depth component. What I mean is that you won't be able to look *around* the product just by taking a stereo pair of photos of it.
Actually constructing a true 3D model of something from photographs alone is a much harder problem than merely presenting two images to a user who does the spatial integration in their head. Sure, there's work being done, but it's fairly primitive, very sensitive to noise, etc. It's not yet ready-for-primetime.
Education is the silver bullet.
... was a two-layer LCD screen where the foreground layer was transaprent and the background layer was about an inch or two back. I saw one of these at Siggraph 2001.
Okay, it didn't look 3D, but it was still damn cool, and it looked just fine. They had one of these hooked up to a Windows box. I'll tell you guys something, it was cool having a foreground and background layer to put windows around in. I was really getting into that! It was certainly more interesting than trying to pull off stereoscopy with a 'sweet spot'.
Aren't these screens technically 4-D?
You've got X coordinates, you've got Y coordinates, you've got T as in time, and now you've got Z as in depth. X,Y,T,Z is four dimensions.
Measuring it that was is kind of interesting. Paper'd be 2D because the image doesn't change. Typical monitors would be 3D since they update 60-100 times a second. And stereo monitors would be 4D (In a sense...) since they are monitors with depth.
Anybody remember 'electric ink' that's supposed to show up one day? That'd become 3D and so on...
I was thinking that to do this it might help to have a more convex-style display, having the inner pixels represented in 3d by using a form of overlay. The future monitor may actually be some sort of ball which projects the image from an inner core. Feasible, but requiring a whole lot more surface area and likely 10 times the cost, not to mention one heckuva powerful video card.
There was once something that used a convex display, more of a bubble actually, at the arcade which had 3d in this form. It was many years ago, so there's probably an improvement, but it was actually somewhat reminiscent of the holodisplays from star ways. The character that talked to you actually did seem to be standing up inside the bubble.
This might not be great for FPS games, but would be awesome for 3d modelling, and space/strategy games... very awesome
If you code it, they will come - phorm
...or does anyone else find the sentence "flat 3D screen" a bit funny?
RMN
~~~
That is not the first autostereo LCD display at all. More information and lot of links on this page.
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
He used a grating that he'd generated by writing a little postscript program for a laser printer (to make lines with the right spacing) then copying it to an overhead-projector foil. Put in front of a standard LCD turned 90 degrees (so the three colors of each pixel are aligned vertically) and you have a stereo display.
All these guys did is substitute a second LCD for the grating so they could turn the grating off to switch between a full-resolution 2-d or a half-resolution stereo display.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
You forgot:
Patent 3D LCD, license patent to big companies, make killing.
Synergy is your friend