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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."
Unless theyve been run over by a steamroller..
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
Can you imagine how sick you would get playing the original DOOM onthis??
but it's only a matter of time before we're arguing here about what looks better in 3D, Gnome or KDE
It's a sad day when you hear the words "3D display" and the first thing that comes to mind is desktops wars, not pornography.
i don't see how a 3d desktop can be usefull to anybody. movies, games and simulation are the only things that bennevit from this. ( still exited the see it though, mmorpg in 3d would rule the world !!! )
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.
# never looked so good
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
Can you imagine how bad Powerpoint presentations are going to be with this sort of technology? It was bad enough when we gave them clip art...
Those red slatted glasses (that came in a McDonalds happy meal) were just the thing I needed to further ostrisize myself from my schoolmates in Oklahoma, as if running something called a Pirate BBS and actually reading the BTTF books (which all sucked except part III) didn't do that well enough already. Now kids can be singled out from the next car on public transports for mugging, thanks to Billy and his newly co-produced 3D minesweeper.
I for one welcome my 3D natalie portman.
-pm
** "It's not my job to stand between the people talking to me, and the ones listening to me." -- Pego the Jerk
Well this wasn't actually... ;-)
Wasn't this a nice try to submit a relevant first post ?
I'm waiting for /. in 3D: I can imangine it... the thread of posts seen as a 3D structure!
- "Having a clean conscience is sign of bad memory"
"...it's only a matter of time before we're arguing here about what looks better in 3D, Gnome or KDE."
Oh what joy! Proof I'm not a geek! My first thought was 3D pr0n. Gnome and KDE were the last things on my mind when I read about this.
~~~~~~~~~ "I must create my own system, or be enslav'd by another man's." William Blake, Jerusalem.
This can't be very good for the viewing angle though, can it? You'd have to be sitting right in front of it.
Does the OS have to support this screen? I cant't imagine current operating systems of being able to handle this 3D effect native. Of course, they will supply windows drivers, but to really decide if gnome or kde look better you will propably need a linux driver. i just hope that they will release the architecture and drivers so that also the linux community can participate in the glorious 3D features. furthermore it would be of interest if (provided no drivers are present) the image looks blurry or if it just looks flat 2D.
/. a few weeks ago, imagine, no display you have to flap open, a REALLY slim notebook and the geek factor to have a image to come out of virtually nothing..
I mysql would appreciate a laptop featuring this "smoke screen" that was posted here in
".Sig Stealer" was here
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!
The image at the bottom of the screen seems to suggest that it will actually show images larger than the screen size!!! This is not just 3D it holographic floating in the air.
Maybe I should just RTFA.
Lots of people still think that there is nothing you can do on 2d Desktops that you cannot do on the command line. The 2D desktop is still settling in, 20 years or so after it ws first invented. I think a 3D desktop could well have a lot to offer.
What you will need is an improvement on the mouse. One of the reasons that my real-world desktop is easier to use than my GUI desktop is that I can move my head to see how thinkgs are stacked. For example, I have a couple of MySQL manuals stacked; the upper is larger, so on a 2D desktop I couldn't see the lower. But a tiny move of my head shows me the spint of the lower. We will need to replicate that functionality before a 3D desktop really works.
Actually, that functionality could be replicated on a 2D desktop - redraw a pseudo-3D desktop as move my viewpoint (Doom engin inside Windows?). So it is the mouse that needs improvement, not the screen.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Found it here:2 020/
http://www.mobilemag.com/content/100/336/C
Holograms send a different image to each eye but still have a wide range of viewing angles. I don't see why a computer display cannot do the same.
I have this secret design (oops, posted it to Slashdot, now it can't be patented anymore) for a new workspace design, which depends on a 3D display.
Basically you throw down objects you're working on, into concentric piles. The most important stuff stays 'hot', near you, while stuff you use less often gets gradually pushed further and further back.
To open a document or web site you just click it, and it becomes 'hot' again. There's a little text box I can type keywords in, to find matching documents.
That's about it. Replaces the hierarchical file system with something much closer to the way I work (and AFAIK, many creative people work).
Ceci n'est pas une signature
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.
Some pics can be found here.........
http://www.sharp.co.jp/mebius/index.html
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?
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
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
...those 2d laptops, put the bloody things down, you can't find 'em again. That extra dimensions gonna make all the difference.
but it's only a matter of time before we're arguing here about what looks better in 3D, Gnome or KDE."
Methinks CowBoyNeal has been deprived of sex for too long...
eTrade SUCKS
Then you don't understand holograms or LCD computer displays.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Why has this been implemented in a laptop? If its as good as it seems I'd much rather see it been used in tv's/flat screen moniters first and surely this would be a far larger market than laptop users alone? Maybe im missing the point but a huge, 3d widescreen tv sounds pretty good to me!
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 imagine it would probably be more a textured surface that split the image up (much like those old 3D stickers that gave the impression of depth by showing the image at an angle relative to the angle you looked at it). It would be thinner but I don't know if that's actually how it works.
This has been around in print for years now; I guess it was only a matter of time before some bright spark applied it to screens.
I always thought that it would be particularly good for 3D Games.
I know, I know... I need to learn a little English.
the 3d information's all contained within the opengl layer, you just need to write appropriate video drivers.
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 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.
I understand that the resolution will be halved in one direction when using the 3D display mode. That might make it rather useless for normal use. Or can the 3D-effect also be switched on for certain regions of the display?
It has to be KDE. Who wants to see a big grey foot poking out at them?
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
So what's going to be the breakthrough control interface for 3D like the mouse was for 2D? And don't point at one of those "3D mice" with the little eraser pointer for scroll on them either. Maybe one of the gyroscopic mice but I think I'd get tired of having to hold the damn thing up in the air 8 hours a day. Maybe something like the SpaceOrb 360, but I couldn't get any decent precision with that when I had one.
Maybe someone should dust off the old NES U-force and find a way to integrate it into the laptop.
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
"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?
Just curious as to what, if any, impact this would have on your eyes since each one would be seeing a separate image therefore working a bit harder to make sense of it.
I'm remembering the strain of looking at stereoscopic images and this sounds a bit like that.
Any ideas?
It does not have to be LCD. Technologies evolve and LCD may be replaced by superior display systems.
I believe it is entirely possible that a computer display could be both 3D and allow an acceptable range of viewing angles. If this has not already been achieved by this Sharp laptop I think it will be achieved within the next ten years.
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.
A BSOD in 3d will still end up looking flat...
I work that way a lot, too. One place where it's obvious is in me rarely using bookmarks for web pages. Instead, I use the url dropdown in my web browser where my most commonly and frequently visited websites are nearly always near the top without me having to actively bother saying I want them to be there.
It falls over a little for less frequent things, like interesting websites that don't get updated very often and so I forget to go back to them.
if at least NEC and Sharp market 3d screens, then no one company will be able to own the market and demand whatever price they feel like selling it at.
Fair enough. For some reason I thought you were actually referring to the topic of this article. ;-)
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
All people see in 2D, at least the ones I know. Most that I've met even think in 2D. This 3D monitor should be interesting, but what kind of brain implants and neural retraining will it require? And, is the radiation used for scanning safe?
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Surgeons could model the organs they are about to cut into. Architects could see their building from any angle. Professional sports could use it for some kick-ass replay. The list goes on and on.
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?"
Could be worse: think of goatse and tubgirl in 3D ** shudder **
We've been here before with 3D glasses and a variety of other innovations that died quickly. True, this laptop may not need glasses, but I'm cynical as to it's real application. It might make consumers go 'Ooo! Shiny' but then I suspect the majority walk on by without putting down any hard cash. Plus unless Sharp can convince manufacturers that adding this feature to their games is worth the time and effort, I can see this dying a quick death.
Actually, it just gives me headaches.
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
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.
Lenticular Displays.
You know those pictures that change as you tilt them or walk by. These displays were all the rage at SIGGRAPH this year, but IMHO, they weren't very good at displaying true "3D".
Some various pics.
Yes, pretty much.
/. near the top
If I had a free week and some skill with any graphics library, I'd hack it together.
Imagine your desktop, piled with lots of random documents. Each document is a URL referring to a resource somewhere on the net, most of them local to you, some on your LAN, others on the Internet.
When you create a new resource, the cluttertop simply throws a new icon somewhere on top of a pile. You can move it around as you like, especially in 3D space (closer, further from you).
When you look at the space closest to you, you see concentric piles of the stuff you need to use the most.
Let's see:
- pile of stuff for my customers
- pile of interesting web sites,
- pile that is all my 'interesting' incoming email, filtered by my personal agents
- pile that holds all the digital photos I promised my wife I'd check through and get printed
- etc.
I guess something like three or four piles up front, with dozens of older ones receding into the infinite background space.
Perhaps I can switch desktops occasionally. I might start a desktop per project, cool. Like a cat, I like to make a mess in one place for a whole, then find a new, clean one to start over again.
This is the way my creative process works: the formal filing that hierarchical systems impose is no good at all, I need to throw down my junk and let time and energy filter the good stuff out.
Ah, I'm going to have to sponsor a starving developer somewhere... It may mean selling one of my Porsches, but hey, the era of dot-com excesses is over anyhow, they tell me.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
- http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/2003/0911/shar
p 01.jpg
- http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/2003/0911/shar
p 02.jpg
- http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/2003/0911/shar
p 03.jpg
- http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/2003/0911/shar
p 04.jpg
Here's a japanese article at PC WatchBig difference: the WinXP features are glued onto a model that I already find useless. In some respects it makes sense to "clean up" an over-complex hierarchical organization, but my idea is to avoid it entirely.
The GUI I'm thinking of is actually very simple. OK, I'm going to continue this in my journal.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
deja vu...I could swear I've seen this story on /. a dozen times already...
in other news - Jimmy Chi announces 3D laptop...no pictures yet, but let's discuss!
According to the article: "The computer display produces 3D images by sending a slightly different image to the right eye and the left eye at once by bending them in different angles, according to Sharp."
;)
Ewwww! I don't *want* my eyes bent in different angles, that sounds painful.
Exactly. I'm sure there is enough knowledge here to modify an existing graphics engine. I'm sure it'd make a great open source project, or a fair amount of coin for someone.
I know, I know... I need to learn a little English.
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.
What post? The one you're carrying inside your rusty innards!
The computer display produces 3D images by sending a slightly different image to the right eye and the left eye at once by bending them in different angles
AAAH! MY EYES! IT'S BENDING MY EYES!!
The textured surface I was describing would do exactly what is described in the article.
I know, I know... I need to learn a little English.
http://www.benchmark.pl/obrazki/9_2003/sharp_3d.jp g
-- mg
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).
----
Spam subject of the moment: Offshore account secrets -nashville disrupt
Actually, I'm pretty sure that any current 3D game can use this technology fairly easily... lots of current games support 3D if you have LCD shutter glasses, or a dual-image HMD.
The game instructs the graphics card to render a 3D environment from a particular location on a map, from a particular height, looking in a particular direction. Lets see - x,y,z + pitch, roll, & yaw, right? Anyway, the card just has to alternately bump the 'y' coordinate back and forth a bit to generate two images, one for each eye.
I've played Half-Life like that, and it's kinda cool... the monitor I had to get to support 60Hz/eye was kind of expensive at the time, though.
Mebius now only has a small sample of 3D applications, such as an image of fruit and flowers and an animation of dinosaurs. But Sharp is hoping other companies will design 3D games and videos
So, it uses some proprietary 3D format? It's junk then. Why not have it support OpenGL and DirectX?
I Had a TNT2 when they came out that had 3D glasses and worked perfectly with any OpenGL/DirectX graphics... why should this be different?
no comment
The question remains: Will the 3D-mode button only work with Windoze. The article says that it ships with Windoze XP.
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
3D Screen? Pwash! That's nothing!
My entire laptop is 3D! You can walk around it and see it from different angles and everything!
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
(1) This display does not require special googles, which is a good thing because they can be very cumbersome.
(2) With this device, the 2D and 3D modes can be toggled electronically, as mentioned in the original press release. 3D images do put strain on your eyes, but if you don't like that, you can always go back to the traditional 2D mode.
As a side note, we usually do not share the screen of a laptop computer, so the last problem you mentioned is not a big issue in this case.
I, for one, am very excited by this news, being a big fan of 3D movies. I cannot wait until the prices of these displays go down and I can actually get my hands on one of them....
This was a post on slashdot not too long ago: http://individual.utoronto.ca/iizuka/research/cell ophane.htm
"Sorry Im not more user-friendly."
-n-
INFO ABOUT THE COMPUTER
INFO ABOUT HOW THE 3D LCD WORKS
Sorry for the lack of a translation, but I am an interpreter not a translator.
blade
http://www.ohlssonvox.com
Becuase how would you see it with your 2D monitor silly!
(This is a joke, designed to provoke an emotional response)
One man's pink plane is another man's blue plane.
i'd like to see one when they come out, but i bet it gives you a headache to work with it too long... :-P
This is almost certainly related to this story from last year. Who thought they would actually bring it to market?
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
Okay, I'm going to be the old fart and piss all over this idea.
Other than the eye-candy factor, what does this give anyone? With a *true* 3D screen, CAD and medical imaging applications would really benefit. But everything else would be visual masturbation.
At least until we get 3D media. That's one of the two major problems. All of our media today is 2D. Our text documents are 2D. Our photos are 2D. Our quicktime movies are 2D. Maybe when we get 3D cameras and hollywood starts giving us 3D movies that do more than explore the boundaries of cheese, it might be different. But even then, 3D images are still static in that you can't rotate them beyond a few degrees.
What about the actual work you and I do on our systems? I've heard a lot of people ruminate on 3D user interfaces. I think they're smoking crack. Yes, there's a lot of really cool eye-candy stuff you can get. But what about real usability? Programming the innards of a 3D spreadsheet would be a piece of cake. In essence, they already are. Programming the UI of a 3D spreadsheet would be a nightmare though. Can you imagine a usable 3D spreadsheet? Wouldn't today's 2D sheets stacked in z-order be incredibly more usable?
The other major problem is the monitor itself. No matter how much you don't want it to be so, the monitor is still a 2D veiwport. Back when the primary output device of a computer was a 1D stream of text on a teletype or printer, line editors were king. But the 2D screen editor happened very shortly after the 2D monitor arrived. But there's no 3D monitor out there, so trying to put 3D data on a 2D monitor is as silly as running a 2D screen editor on a daisywheel printer terminal.
Some other posts have mentioned the Star Wars chessboard. That's what we need before we go to true 3D interfaces: a true 3D display. Not a 2D viewport into a 3D world, but an actual 3D world we can walk around. That Star Wars chessboard might as well be 2D if your head is rigidly locked into a single position. All it gains you is depth perception.
I fully expect 3D to become the norm as soon as we dump the monitor viewport for a real 3D desktop (that is literally a desktop), and start using more 3D data. In the mean time the current z-order paradigm of 2D images on a stack will rule. We might add some eye-candy to it, but it's still going to be 2D.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
So, if we coat the new 3D Computer in beer, I wonder if we get 3D Beer Goggles?
If at first you don't succeed, so much for skydiving.
Check the link.
He was in both, and definitely in the 50's.
Share and Enjoy!
Maybe this was the last piece of the "puzzle" to create Duke Nukem Forever! True 3D. Maybe I'm wrong!
You?re wrong. Our brains/eyes are pretty good at aligning to make a good picture. Think of looking at an object close or far away. As you look at your finger 6 inches away your eyes are rather cross-eyed though the finger is in perfect focus. As the object is further away your eyes adjust and straighten out. The eye automatically finds that point where the images come into congruence. Another example: In those 3D pattern pictures there is actually a range of distances you can be from them. The trick is not being at the exact centimeter away but rather having your eyes crossed the correct amount. There will be some limitation one viewable angel and distances but not so much as to make them difficult to use. Our brains/eyes are pretty good at aligning to make a good picture. Think of looking at an object close or far away. As you look at your finger 6 inches away your eyes are rather cross-eyed though the finger is in perfect focus. As the object is further away your eyes adjust and straighten out. The eye automatically finds that point where the images come into congruence. Another example: In those 3D pattern pictures there is actually a range of distances you can be from them. The trick is not being at the exact centimeter away but rather having your eyes crossed the correct amount. There will be some limitation one viewable angel and distances but not so much as to make them difficult to use.
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because if it's splitting the alternating lines down the path where MY eyes aren't, what's the guy to my left see? My left' eye's portion? That's weak. Wake me up when we have holo-screens.
I used to work for Sharp building microwaves to find my college education. Whilst there, one of my supervisors said she was at the research labs in Oxford and they were working on the technology for use in televisions. This was many years ago, and at the time, a white dot had to be placed on the forehead in order to calibrate the screen so that distance and angle would not be a problem. It seems, however, that the current version of the technology does not do this: I wonder if that is a good thing or a bad thing?
I get excellent 3D screen viewing with split parallel images. I use a loreo lite 3D viewer I got for two dollars.
This is only the 1st time this has been made (I'm assuming, I know), but realise that as other companies jump on this idea, and the competition increases, you will be able to view things from more angles, etc.). Question: if a game works @ 120 FPS at the one angle it desplays, workin in 3d will cause the video card to rerender a different picture for every angle of the 3d image, slowing down the FPS how much?