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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.
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.
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
"...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.
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.
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!
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
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).
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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?
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
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!!
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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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
No... most people see in 3D. This is a fact I'm keenly aware of since depth perception is something that I lack. I do have both eyes, but my brain is incapable of using them together to form depth-percepted image. The result is that my brain just filters out one of the inputs -- usually my left eye since my right eye is dominant -- otherwise I have double-vision.
:)
The end result is that I can't throw nor catch for the life of me. Doorknobs are often hard for me when I'm tired. Stairs are hazardous to my health. I have to count the steps lest I miss one and I ALWAYS use the handrail. I've almost fallen on stairs twice in the last week alone. Bionoculars, red-blue 3D glasses, and stereograms screw with my brain's filtering ability and causes double-vision, so I can't use them either (unless I close one eye).
I can safely say that this condition is found only in a small minority of population -- or else you'd find piles of bodies crumbled up on the landing of staircases
The
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 : )
"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. "
That would be easy to debate. Unfortunately, everybody suddenly becomes a minimalist when their precious CPU cycles are spent doing snazzier UI effects. Anything the UI does to tell you what the computer is doing is good. Remember when Win2k came out and the menus faded in and out? That was good. Did it use CPU cycles? Yes. Did it take longer for the menu to come up? Yes. Is it bad? No. When that menu fades in, you have a moment to realize the new thing that just popped up. Little animations like that give the mind something to respond to. This means that using your computer becomes a reflect. Efficiency is achieved. You'd be surprised as to the subtle things people notice and respond to, like screen refreshes, etc. I can understand the argument that not everybody wants to spend the CPU cycles or the actual time to make those menus fade in/out. Instead of seeing it for what it is, they label it as 'bloat'. Sadly, it's often ignored that Microsoft was kind enough to put in a little "turn it off" feature along with a "Detect how powerful this machine is and turn it off if it's going to be to slow" feature.
Okay, so we understand that UI cues are useful, right? A stereoscopic display could turn into a huge desktop 'must-have'. Imagine stereo-scopic window management. You've not got a new variable of information for your brain to cue off of. The desktop is awlays in the distant background. The start menu is in front of everything. Windows are in between. When a window loses focus, it moves into the background while the new focus moves into the foreground. Are you using a form on a web page? No problemo, the textbox's depth moves a little closer to you without actually changing the physical size of it. No more confusion about which field you actually have selected!
As a 3D artist, I in particular would love to have a good 3D screen. I've been working on a project for the last month that has become rather complex. My machine can barely handle it. I noticed something interesting while working on this project. I spend quite a bit of time studying my model by making it rotate subtley. Sadly, the frame rate is so slow that it's a painful experience, but I do it anyway. As it slowly rotates, I have an idea from the paralaxx what is going on with the mesh. It occured to me that what I was doing was compensating for the lack of depth information. A stereoscopic display would have saved me a good deal of time here, plus it wouldn't have needed all that much more processing power!
Stereoscopy, if done in such a way that it doesn't induce headaches, will be a much bigger hit than people think. It's not just a gimmick. It's an extra dimension.
On another note, the best display I've seen wasn't exactly stereoscopic, but it did have 2 layers. It was a pair of LCD screens, one in front of the other, and the forerground one was transparent. No "you gotta have your head right HERE." No "you need funny glasses!" None of that stuff. It did, though, have a very clear foreground and background. I remember wishing I had one on my desktop.
"Derp de derp."
Check the link.
He was in both, and definitely in the 50's.
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