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3D "Crystal Ball" Monitors
glesga_kiss writes "Actuality Systems have issued a press release announcing sales of their 3D display technology, as reported by Yahoo Finance. The system works similar to an old spining disk optical illusion, except that the 21st century version produces an image that can change through the use of digital projection. In this case the screen is a rotating disk that is capable of producing light at any point that it passes through. The upshot is that you get a real 3D representation of your object, that can be viewed from 360 degrees around the display, without the need for any special goggles. Not quite ready for Hollywood, but the scientific and engineering communities have some obvious uses for it already..."
just imagine how cool this would be!! 3dWM
I dont think true 3d will ever be ready for Hollywood. Movies are made to tell a story. Thats why camera angles and such are important. The story is whats happening on the other side of the room.
Something like this needs a "Killer App" to really take off. There's lots of mention of uses in the fields of medicine, nuclear whatever, and other big important things, but I don't think that's what's going to push these things. So, what is? Simple. Porn. Come on, you KNOW you'd buy it if you could watch 3D porn on it!
This will be very helpful for people who do medical and scientific imaging.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
It is this little thing called responsible linking. I have been admin of several websites, and I know first hand just how much bandwidth those images can take. If someone isn't interested enough to do a little ferreting, then they shouldn't be absorbing my bandwidth on something that really isn't of interest to them.
Either way, you've pulled a successful karma-whoring, so congrads.
YOU SUCK BALLS!
Of course, here, we start veering off into the insanely interesting tangent of perception of reality. I'm colorblind, thus my internal color set is slightly different than yours. Most of the time, it doesn't make a difference, but at the same time, I hate talking about colors because my mental crayon box has different labels than yours. How exactly do you describe the color blue, anyways?
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
I think, as it was mentioned earlier, this has amazing applications for the science and engineering communities. Ever try visualizing a three dimensional mathematical function in your head? Except for most simple functions, this can be near impossible for all but a very few gifted people.
Chemists, Engineers, Physicists, etc, will all be able to see three dimensional functions with this new monitor without having to be exceptionally gifted at math. True, there are computer programs that can represent three dimensional functions extremely well on a computer screen... but they're still just a projection onto a 2D-surface.
This will also help Chemists in viewing complicated chemical models of protein chains, or reactions, whatever else.
I can think of a million reasons for having this around that maybe the average consumer won't have a use for, but the scientific community at large will have hundreds of uses for. And as the price comes down, then popularity among consumers, who may not have a driving need it for it, will increase.
I bet it will catch on quickly in research institutions, engineering firms, and universities and slowly trickle into business and consumer applications (games on a large version of this would be awesome). Reminds me of computers.
There's a reason why all the examples they show are wireframe.
The device is just a spinning disc with lights, the disc is transparent so all you end up seeing are the lights apparently floating in a 3d plane. None of the points of light are going to be able to block eachother to display solid surfaces -- if you try to display a solid cube then each surface of the cube will be translucent and you'll end up seeing all sides of the cube atonce.
Without being able to display solid surfaces you're pretty limited the applications for it.
- MbM
How about Air Traffic Controllers they need 3D displays as much or more than anybody
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock. Will Rogers
motion parallax... while you would unfortunately see nothing different in a standard goggle-based 3d video or movie, a device like the crystal ball would appear 3d as soon as you moved your head. We 2 eye types see a television screen a little differently than through a window, and if you think about it, so do you. With a window, your viewing angle determines the area seen on the other side, and the apparent relationships of forms to one another. Not so in televisions, where the image instead just uniformly distorts according to the viewing angle. With the crystal ball, moving around the ball would reveal different aspects of the object being displayed, and you'd get a sense of the object's depth as you moved.
Rule 4:
Make fun of other Karma Whores if there's nothing interesting to say.
I'll go one further: its damn helpfull for everyone who does 3d modeling. Engineers, gamedevelopers, biologists, whatever; if they've 3d-modeled on a 2d screen, they know that the 2d representation of a 3d object can be pretty distorive. Especially when you're looking at one angle for a while, especially while prototyping.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
here almost a year ago Friday May 24, @02:44PM 2002
The Only Person Willing to be Me is ME!