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."

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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.

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

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.