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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
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?"