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3D Display a Little Bit Closer to Reality
arielsebbag writes "According to CNET, Several high-tech companies including Sony and Sanyo have officially unveiled a consortium to create technical and safety standards for bringing three-dimensional displays to desktops, laptops and cell phones. They are probably focusing their efforts on the technology developed by Sharp. It looks like they are actually good to go and hopefully the 3D display will hit the market by 2004."
Oh great... Like it's not annoying enough when I'm trying to have dinner with a friend and his stupid girlfriend calls him to nag him for 20 minutes in the middle of it... Now he'll actually get totally engaged in the experience of humoring her and completely forget I'm there. Isn't technology wonderful?
Please God, let me find my blue hat with the red trim. (Frances Farmer)
Is there going to be any legitimate non-gaming or high end science usage for something like this? I can't see this being relevant to any more than 1/100 of the computer using populace.
sig.
Can someone explain to me a little better what a 3D display is exactly? I dont get it. As far as I'm concerned, my monitor already does 3D.
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3D BSODs.
Just what I always wanted.
Talk of 3D screens always make me think back to the failed Nintendo VirtuaBoy. It gave you glocoma (Yes, you can smoke pot legaly, but that's beside the point.)
People don't want to watch TV/use a computer on a peripheral device. They want to do it sitting back in a comfy chair.
While objects in the background do not pose problems, viewing objects in the foreground can cause the eyes to shift back and forth rapidly.
The main reason I wear glasses is by using a poor quality monitor for about 6 years, since the pixels jiggle my eyes would constantly refocus. Hopefully, they can fix this to some extent...
sig.
It will never happen! Remember that no technology becomes popular without being embraced by the porn industry and how the heck will the porn industry work with 3D displays?!? It's pointless to think about it I mean it's completely and utterly ridiculo...
ooh...
ooohhhhhhh!!!
ummmm nevermind
I stole this Sig
Dude, time to come out of the closet, maybe?
And I bet the motivation for the engineers was 3D pr0n boobies.
I've heard that future versions of windows will escape the standard 2 dimensional desktop and add a 3D element to the GUI. Will these be the types of displays it will use? and how can they code for a 3D GUI without having a device to use it with? Or was it just 3D-looking on a standard 2D display.. ideas?
John Hancock
The friend I'm thinking of is quite straight, though.
Please God, let me find my blue hat with the red trim. (Frances Farmer)
I'm not saying it might not be usefull in the same applications it's usefull in now, but untill I can use one for 6 hours with no eyestrain, I don't think I want one.
UT2003/3D would be pretty damn cool, though...
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Seriously though, 3D displays are extremely useful for a variety of applications, from architecture (actual 3D renderings that you can actually walk around and see) to medicine (detailed and accurate 3D MRI imaging).
Of course, this particular article deals with 3D for entertainment purposes, so of course I have to mention the most probable use for 3D displays, which is 3D pr0n (in case you didn't catch the 50 or so other posts making the same exact joke).
I'm such a hack.
Cool tech, two LCDs seperated by a screen rather than glasses, but the eye strain problem seems to be a killer. Think of all the problems with eye strain from a regular monitor (ergonomics, hysteria to some degree, possibly law suits).
The CNN and news.com.com articles were a little short on details, the each eye recieving a seperate image makes me think that the alignment of the two screens is horizontally side by side, rather than one behind the other with a slight offset.
I could've missed something however.
Anyway, I seem to remember a projection based holo game (was some kinda wierd space western) I played in the arcade in the early 90's, it used various projectors onto various pieces of glass to generate a 3D image (and looked pretty good if I recall). Isn't there better tech out there for true 3D rather than a flatscreen LCD?
The key to the enjoyment of pop music is to replace any instance of "love" with "C.H.U.D."
That's all I've got to say.
Informatus Technologicus
For example, the 3D images are best viewed from 40 centimeters away, Sharp representatives said. Sitting closer or further away results in seeing two overlapping images As with all other 3D attempts, doesn't this kind of defeat the purpose? You pretty much have to view the 3D model from a fixed point, so you may as well just render the image in 2D. How is viewing a "3D" image any better than a 2D representation of a 3D model when you can't rotate your head around the image?
I.O.U One Sig.
Seen 3D displays already from 15" LCDs to 50" plasmas from ddd. Check them out at www.ddd.com
This has actually been done, but using specially created crystals instead of a gas. Somehow when the two lasers hit the same point it causes the crystal to fluoresce. Unfortunately the process to create the crystals is extremely expensive and they were having a lot of trouble with the scan rates of the laser, iirc.
h tml
Here's a (apparently outdated) link:
http://www.vdivde-it.de/felix/english_solidfelix.
Search first, ask questions later.
We've been working with 3D video and 3D live web cams for the past few years, and the biggest obsticle is the need to wear "funny glasses".
Best Buy can have you arrested
Finally, we'll be able to use 3dwm in its full glory !
theefer
Does anyone remember FELIX 3D displays? I know they can't be used on cell phones, but at least they work...
Dimentions Technologies Incorporated have been selling 3D monitors (without the glasses!) for years. When they first came out they got very favorable reviews, but the major quip was with the price. Well, the prices have come down significantly, and you can get a 15" True 3D flat panel monitor, for $1700, and an 18" for $5000. 32-Bit color, resolutions up to 1024x768 (for the smaller ones), and 1280 x 1024 for the big ones, that's not such a bad deal. Also, it goes from 2D monitor to 3D at the toch of a button. Not bad if you ask me.
Site is here.
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Take comfort in your ignorance.
Grandmaster Plague
I can't help but think that this is the kind of jump in technology that Apple is uniquely positioned to popularize.
One day, they'll simply announce that they'll only sell 3D displays from then on. There will be alot of customers buying 3rd party monitors for a while, just like there were when they switched to all LCDs, but plenty of customers will buy the displays just 'cause they come with their Macs.
Meanwhile Apple gets to drop selling plain old LCDs, which by then will be a low profit margin commodity, just as CRTs were when they dropped them, and move to selling only higher end/higher profit displays. And selling them in more volume than anyone else is likely to be at the time, because of their access to all Mac customers.
And Apple is well positioned for the move on the software side too. They have already re-implemented their entire windowing system in OpenGL. It would be relatively trivial to add 3D window positioning and widgets. (And damn cool in some ways too, there will certainly be some useless eye candy, but some simple obvious things like being able to look behind a window just by moving your head a bit, would by really cool imho).
Other large volume computer companies, like Dell, would undoubtedly follow in Apple's footsteps, looking for the same advantages, but none of them have the secure vertical niche that Apple has.
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
One word: cellphone
Actually that might be two words.
Anyways, in Japan they ALREADY are taking advantage of this technology - you can take 3D pictures on your photo-capable cellphones, print them out, etc etc. I don't know how well it works because I havn't seen it in action yet, but it has sure been in commercials a lot lately.
Don't think of 3D as a real 3D like "volumetric" but more like those magic-eye things - where it's an illusion of 3D, in the other words, you don't get more data (i.e. you never see more of the sides of the 3D thing by changing your perspective, trying to look at the display from the sides), but the object appears 3D, fooling your eyes.
Editors might want to get this straight too
My life in the land of the rising sun.
This technology sounds like a more complicated (and expensive) version of the already-complicated and expensive LCD technology we have. Furthermore, it doesn't sound like the technology will work well with the OLED's that are just starting to come out.
Given a choice between "3D" LCD and 2D OLED, I'll take OLED, thank you very much.
Read my keyboard review.
"One of the first subcommittees will examine establishing methods for tweaking software applications so that they can take advantage of 3D screens. Hardware input-output specifications will be the subject of another subcommittee."
3D Consortium member list:
Sony, Sanyo, Itochu, NTT Data, Sharp, Microsoft, Kodak,Olympus
Who's proprietary drivers will be the only thing it works with for the first few years?
http://www.realtime-3d.com
there are graphic @dult 3d videos and images availabe that display the possiblities.
...in the article is that, to achieve the illusion of depth, the user must continuously blink one eye, then the other, exactly 30 times per second.
SIG FAULT
"In a 32-bit world, you're a 2-bit user. You've got your own newsgroup, alt.total.loser." -Weird Al
Thank goodness they are outlining some safety standards for there displays. I sure wouldn't want to zoom in on a pixilated 3D model and have a nipple poke me in the eye.
I have read through the posts, and many people have stated that it only simulates 3D through twin images, but hurts the eye due to it all being on a single focal plane. While I can understand this, what I don't get is how does the eye know what the focal plane is?
I mean, if I close one eye and look at the monitor, it is in focus. If I then hold my finger ~10cm from my eye, it will be out of focus unless I try to look at it, in which case the monitor will be out of focus. In what way does a SINGLE eye have to change to focus at these different lengths? And how does it "know" where to focus on without the input from the second eye? Would it possible to trick the eye into thinking that the light is coming from a particular distance, regardless of where it is really coming from? If so, then you'd be able have true 3D, wouldn't you?
When I was at school, my friends and I devised exactly this - our unit of pain was called a "stang" and was measured as the amount of pain deriving from being burnt alive at the stake.. of course, this means that for more everyday painful stimuli, you'd probably have to measure in microstangs, or picostangs or something