Sharp Announces 3D Laptop

wembley writes "The Associated Press is running a story about a forthcoming Sharp laptop with a 3D screen. I can't find any pictures, but it requires no glasses, so you don't have to walk around looking like Biff's sidekick in Back to the Future. It comes with WinXP, but it's only a matter of time before we're arguing here about what looks better in 3D, Gnome or KDE."

Comments

Details

[BJH]

If you can read Japanese, here's Sharp's explanation of how it works.

If you can't, look at the pretty diagrams and the stupid faked 3D photo.

Only slightly 3D

[Mwongozi]

If this is the same laptop I think it is, it works by having two LCD screens, one behind the other, with a gap between.

The front screen can make pixels transparent, which show the rear screen, allowing depth to be shown.

Can't be very good for thin-ness...

Re:Only slightly 3D

[Mwongozi]

Okay, this isn't the same laptop I was thinking of. It actually works by sending a different image to the left and right of the screen. Mod parent down please. :P

This can't be very good for the viewing angle though, can it? You'd have to be sitting right in front of it.

Re:Only slightly 3D

[AlecC]

I think it is what you were thinking of,, actually. The upper one is used to screen alternate columns of pixels from one eye or the other. When the upper is off, you have (say) 640 pixels on the line. Turn the upper one on, and the left eye can se the 320 even numbered pixels and the right eye can see the 320 odd numbered pixels - if the spacing is just right.

Suspect it will work only at the right distance and have rotten viewing angles. OK for PDAs, not for home TV or big monitors where people want to move around or look over shoulder. And it loses half the light. Back to the days of early "hold it just so" laptops?

Re:Only slightly 3D

[p3d0]

Then you don't understand holograms or LCD computer displays.

Re:Only slightly 3D

[Ibix]

Holograms are kind of like those 3-d Magic Eye pictures you get, although a fair chunk more sophisticated. Essentially you choose a flat surface infront of your object, and work out everything (phase, intensity) about the light that passes through this surface on its way to your eye. You record this on a photographic film and, hey presto, the eye is fooled into thinking there's an object there when light shines on the pattern.

Their viewing angle sucks because there's an assumption - light "on the way to the eye". Sure you can see tholograms off axis, but they get distorted really quickly. Not too bad for a picture of the starship Enterprise, but reading distorted text gets tiring really quickly.

I

I already have my KDE desktop in 3D

[borgdows]

I use 3D-Desktop.

It's is an OpenGL program for switching virtual desktops in a seamless 3-dimensional manner on Linux. With this program your desktop looks futuristiiiic and you can impress your friends!

Picture of Mebius

[Anonymous Coward]

Found it here:
http://www.mobilemag.com/content/100/336/C2 020/

Only an animated switch between desktops

[Frans Faase]

This is really lame. It is only giving you an animation of switching between desktops, not a real 3D desktop. This has been done (much better) a long time ago by SGI, where they would have such an animation everytime you opened a folder. Makes your eyes dizzy after a while. These kind of animations don't add anything useful, just a gadget to show of to your friend. I bet that you could do the same in Windows.

Re:Only an animated switch between desktops

[shibashaba]

theres the 3d window manager(3dwm.org) which does stuff like this(runs on linux, irix and nt at least). Also, the ggi project did some stuff with it too. This can actually do primitives and is being used to create 3d enviroments and virtual reality type stuff.

Pics here!!!!

[geektux]

Some pics can be found here.........

http://www.sharp.co.jp/mebius/index.html

Some links

[Anonymous Coward]

Just finished a writeup on this, so here are some links:

my humble piece in norwegian

some pictures down the page

English explaination of the "parallax" technology

Sharps own specification page

It's only supprted by Windows XP sp1a, by the way.

penhead

no they don't

[RMH101]

the 3d information's all contained within the opengl layer, you just need to write appropriate video drivers.

I saw a demo recently

[chrispl]

I saw the Sharp 3D laptop on display at the 2003 IFA in Berlin. It works on the same principle, lenticular imaging, that has been used for years for 3D collectors cards and posters etc. The screen is covered with thin vertical stripes that redirect light coming off the screen, showing each eye a different image.
The 3D effect is quite convincing however it has a few drawbacks. The biggest problem is you have to look at it from precice angles for the effect to work i.e. if you move your head from side to side you will see the screen go from real 3D to a blur, then inverted 3D, blur... This is especially troublesome if more than one person is trying to look at it at once. The second problem is that to show two images at once each image has only half the resolution of the entire display, making it look fuzzy compared to regular 2D displays.
For some reason the demo they had running only cycled through still pictures of 3D rendered scenes, no video or UI shots which makes me suspicious that these problems are even worse in those applications. It is cool technology no doubt, but it still has some problems to work out.