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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."
not a chance of that... all apps will have to be specially written to take advantage of the screen... it's NOT a magic "use this and everything you've got's 3D" driver...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Well, this kind of 3D can be useful, since it gives you actual stereoscopic cues.
Just keep the normal desktop look and functionality, but use this to really give different windows on screen different depth. Visualizing stacking order would be a very informative cue, helping people make better sense of their desktop.
Another, related, use would be to make floating windows (such as panels and the like), really float in front. Done right, you would no longer feel that they take up screen estate (even though they still do), and be _less_ conspicuous when you aren't interested in them, and more conspicuous when you are.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Be reminded that in 3D mode, the horizontal resolution is halved. That is, a 1024x768 display will show only 512x768 effectively in 3D mode. This is simply due to the implementation, where half of the pixels are sent to the left eye, and the other half sent to the right eye. The first to commercially offer autostereoscopic (the proper term for this) LCD is probably DTI, www.dti3d.com.
www.rexguo.com - Technologist + Designer
I use OpenBox. I'm always one flick of the mouse wheel away from anything I need. If it's lost, I've got a categorized menu of windows available with a middle click on the background.
The command line is better than any file manger I've ever seen, and it uses a hell of a lot less ram.
I'd like to see Apple's Expose on such a display. It will zoom windows out to fit all of them one the screen for selection by the user.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Pseudo 3D (since the medium is really 2D -- unless we're talking about that fog display) will unlikely be able to help you much there. The great benefit of your cluttered real 3D desktop is how wide and fully-emersing it is. I'd say that until your display is moved off a static point on top of your desk to somewhere where it is between you and the rest of the world (glasses? eye band? contacts? brain implant?) all of this 3D tinkering will be mostly eye-candy, not usefull enough...
--AP
"In fact, if you just sit directly in front of the display at about 30" away, as you normally do with any display, you will be in a position where you see 3D."
Thirty inches (75 cm)? I don't know about you, but I'm more like fifteen inches from the screen. At 30 inches, I couldn't read the damn thing.
Does everything include nothing?
I think pr0n looks better "over there". Seriously, do you really want some nasty thing coming out of your laptop? This kinda reminds me of the scent-maker hardware product that would simulate smells. We all commented about some smells that would be possible at pr0n sites, and how certain spam emails would better be left unsmelt.
Personally, I think 3d displays are still fads. Now if it were a 3d hologram display that replaced the flat screen, like the chess boards in Star Wars, then I think there is definately a market (the whole market), but then you're looking at a whole new market for peripherals, or possibly hidden peripherals.
Most of the various current incarnations of 3-D displays contain an ugly, hard-to-resolve flaw. The display rendering routines must make assumptions about the location of each eyeball. Thus, they only create a proper 3-D picture when the person's head is front, center, level, the proper distance from the screen, and of normal eye spacing. Deviations in the position of the eyes from this sweet spot cause distortions in which the two views are inconsistent with the 3-D scene at best, and infusible at worst.
Worst of all are deviations in the angular orientation of the viewer's head WRT the screen. 3-D displays assume that the separation between the eyes is left-right. If the person tilts their head, the images do not fuse properly and cause eye strain or double vision. The only solution is a 4 or 5-axis head tracking system, although a head-mounted 3-D display does provide a first-order correction to the angular orientation problem (it causes other problems, though).
A secondary problem is that only one viewer can ever be in the "sweet" spot of the 3-D system. To create a proper 3-D view for the second person, the system needs to create a second pair of images that are different from those seen by the first person. Add another pair of eye and the need a second pair of images.
3-D has been around for a decades in 3-D movies, computer displays, and VR, but it has never caught on. Its not that it does not work well enough to interest some of the people some of the time, it just doesn't work well enough to interest most of the people, most of the time.
On the other hand, I could be wrong -- I never thought Window's would be popular either.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
There have been lots of articles leading up to this, and most of them are from Sony.
My only question is "Why didn't they create a standalone LCD panel first?"
wrote about it a little here, actually...
the problem with the 3D thing is that it's very, very bad for text-viewing, at least in 3D mode - but then if you forfeit that, what's the whole point? and then you have such a limited view-space from which everything is 3D, so if you are playing, say, 3D games, you can't move your head at all for more than a couple inches each way.
btw, to get the 3D thing you need te sacrifice half the pixel count (half of the pixels to one eye and half to the other eye) - so keep that in mind as well.
over all, a neat lil trick, but i wouldn't sacrifice weight and size (especially thickness) of a laptop for something like this...
My life in the land of the rising sun.
This isn't really 3D. It's still the illusion of 3D on a 2D screen.
Floating windows would still take up just as much screen estate, I wouldnt be able to move my head to the left to see around the web browser i as using to see if i got a new email.
"In wine there is wisdom. In beer there is strength. In water there is bacteria." --Old German Proverb
Nevermind that I don't have the money, but I'm weary to buy first editions of anything. The reason for the weariness is because I bought a 2000 Ford Focus (US first edition) and have had about 7 recalls on the car so far. So let 'em work out the kinks on this new technology and in the same time, drop the price a bit. Oh and get it on the Mac (then again, if it comes to Mac, the price will still be high).
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