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PC Magazine Reviews Sharp's 3D Notebook
Moochman writes "I recently discovered this article over at PC Magazine, an excellent and fairly complete review of the Sharp RD3D, aka the 'world's first 3D laptop' (see previous Slashdot coverage here). In addition to rating performance, features, etc, it provides a nice little explanation and diagram of how the no-glasses 3D technology works, and discusses possible eye-strain issues. The biggest disappointment is that even the included 3D games still don't work right." Moochman provides a link to Sharp's information site, too.
3D, when it blatantly isn't?
Now I come to think of it, it could be 3D if you think of time as being a dimension...
When anger rises, think of the consequences.
Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)
Just think of what spooky things those virus writers could do with this thing!
RD
Good old PC Magazine, where if you don't have a 27" monitor, your computer system is worthless. Sometimes having all that free evaluation hardware and top-of-the-line enterprise-class software causes a reality-free zone where everyone spends $18,000 a year on brightly colored new icons to click.
Quite surprising they didn't use the word "clunky" at least once.
In addition to rating performance, features, etc, it provides a nice little explanation and diagram of how the no-glasses 3D technology works, and discusses possible eye-strain issues
;)
Well, if we're talking about porn being viewed on one of these things, i think eye strain will be the last of their worries
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First off, every laptop is 3D. As long as they don't make it into flat sheets of paper, they have width, height and depth. And then referring to flat screen as 3D... Yeah, mod me down as flamebait/troll, the fact that you see 2 separate images with 2 eyes doesn't make it 3D. You can't look behind it, you can't just tilt your head to see it from different angle, and if you try, you lose all the '3d' effect.
I remember one SCI-FI book where they had a really 3D computer. A small medallion with one button, that upon pressing the button displays a holographic interface - and senses user's interaction with it. And the display is fully holo=3D too.
But that's a far future, and now anything that cheats your brain into seeing depth being called 3D is considered a good marketing technique.
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what i am intereted in is what kind of API they provide to access the 3d capabilities of their display technology. what exactly are the games doing to make them look 3d? is this just an opengl wrapper (like wicked3d for an anaglyph effect) or is there support in the video card hardware to output to this kind of display...interesting stuff though, either way
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Te 3Dness works (or was that fails to work?) by allowing each eye to see a different picture. Only B&W is 3D, and the front picture is color. This is cheaper but no doubt causes problems. It's no surprise that "3D" games don't look 3D on it because it is a different type of 3Dness than before.
Give this some time, and it will improve significanttly. Plus, it will be backed by the computer industry (sell more bigger CPUs and memory)
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Some images just look better in 3D... especially when you have someone paranoid staying over.
Now I can enjoy all of my Pr0n in 3D!
There is a very large number of different projections of 3 dimensional Riemannian space to flat 2D Euclidian space. Using clever parametrisations these projections can suited to every users needs. Further more unlike this 3D-3D projection these dimension lowering projections have less computional complexity, thus requiring less resources.
Even more such projections are known from arbitrary high dimensional spaces to 2D, enabling experts to reconstruct the original pictures easily in their minds.
However for projections from nD to mD with n>5 and m>2 the very extistence of such projections is unknown and noboby has a clue how to cumpute them.
So I don't see the point in producing a 3D display where 2D would be sufficent, besides the coolness factor. But for coolness: these thing are considered to be business machines.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
RD3D? It is anything like R2D2?
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Wouldn't the wave property of light suggest an orbit and detectiion of that orbit through for example cancellation. Perhaps indication of another form of a much simpler matter compared to the extravagance of today's theories. Might be interesting if energy (cross spectrum light) was tied into gravity at a fundimental level.
It still sounds kind of cool though, but this sort of thing is doable on regular hardware with red/blue or LCD shutter glasses, or just doing the eye-crossing thing.
Unfortunately, it costs a hell of a lot of money for something that looks as good or better with $1.50 anaglyph (red/blue) glasses.
After all, my current laptop is what... 14" x 12" x 2"? I want the darn thing to be as thin as a piece of paper... and if it folds up, so much the better. The heck with the fancy displays.
I'd love to see one of the mods in a dark alley and rate him +5 Broken Nose and +3 Smashed-In-Face.
Stop posting anonymously in attempt to save face, Pingular.
...produces a 2-D laptop that can be stored anywhere and has more than 4 hours battery life.
make me vomit? then again I've never been able to handle them 3d glasses eather. I guess it's due to how my eyes work, one at a time...The technology is an interesting Idea but be damned if I'm gonna spend 3200 bucks on a laptop to puke on...
Proof Here!
You could do a coast-to-coast flight without recharging an R2.
2D?! Wuss!! I'm waiting for laptops that are small enough to be 1D!! ;)
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I was amazed last week to find that my GeForce4 Ti4200 is one of a huge number of nVidia cards that support nVidia's 3D stereo drivers. I had a pair of red/blue glasses knocking about from Smash Hits Magazine in 1983, or similar, and literally a couple of minutes later I was playing Tiger Woods 2004, Medal of Honor:AA and an old driving game in wonderful 3D. The best thing of all is that the 3D support is for all DirectX or OpenGL games with no internal support required.
Surely if Sharp had forseen that the driver and technology already existed, they could have got this thing off the ground without having to re-invent the wheel, and then fix the bugs.
Ummm. Mixed metaphor ending.
and there was me hoping to see a room full of business men wearing 60's green and purple glasses whilst listening to a lecture :)
Rus
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I saw those in October: Sharp had a big booth, with these screeens on all the form factors. Altogether Very Nice, but I noticed that these screens are better on handhelds than on laptops, as positioning the screen to your eyes in the *right* (ie fiddly) way is natural with a handheld, but requires neck movemement with a laptop
well, they already have 1D personal data reminder devices
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
I would be interested in seeing how technology like this would work for someone like myself who only has one good eye. Would it act just like a "2D" monitor when it was in "3D" mode or would I only be able to see half of the pixels?
Kind of funny the way it doesn't market...
because you can't see it in action on a normal screen!
They'll have to think of a way to overcome this if to speed up uptake.
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It came with my PC
It plane lee marks for my revue
Miss steaks aye can knot sea.
AnandTech also covered this monitor at COMDEX.
http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.html?i=1924
Of course, total cost per unit is much cheaper for Sharp as they gather up second-tier parts to keep the MSRP down, but it's those second-tier parts that cast a shadow over the 3d gimmick. Once you've showed off the new toy to all your friends, you're still stuck with a niche format DVD burner, a full-sized Pentium 4 Volcano, 2 hours of battery time, and a travel weight that's difficult to justify.
Does Sharp license the technology? Or do they own it outright? Patents?
If anyone knows answers to this stuff I'd appreciate it...
Been trying to dig up this info.
TIA
We've had the experience of getting ahold of some of the demo units because our company, Micoy, is doing work with stereo imaging of full-360-degree video. We were able to take an existing OpenGL-based application and make it work on the RD3D with a few simple function calls.
Essentially, you want to draw your scene twice from two different perspectives: one for the left eye and one for the right eye. Their API uses the OpenGL stencil buffer and sub-pixel-level multi-sampling to take those 2 perspectives and generate a single vertically interlaced image that is output to the screen.
It doesn't actually require the RD3D laptop to use it. You can render it on any standard computer with OpenGL support because they are just using OpenGL functions in the background, and you can see the interlaced image.
All in all, I'd have to say their stuff looks pretty cool as long as you keep your head still.
I don't get it. It took years to convince the industry that it was important to have a detachable keyboard and an adjustable tilt/swivel CRT. The laptop returned to the single-piece design and I've been wondering for some time when we're going to start to hear complaints from people that use them for more than a few hours a day.
But now, we're going to have a device that requires you to hold your head in one specific position in order to view the 3D effect?
This will be a nice business-builder for chiropractors.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I have seen one of these up close (/me looks over to demo unit sitting on desk and no I don't work for Sharp) and I am truly impressed. It does require finding a 'sweet spot' for the entire screen to seem stereo, but there are 'semi-sweet' (like chocolate) spots to the left and right so observers can get a taste. I have been working with shutter glasses for a while now and this beats the eye strain and weight of shutter glasses hands down when dealing with a single PC display.
Interesting side note, with shutter glasses you loose vertical resolution, while with Sharps displays horizontal is compromised.
At the end of the article, an almost incoherent comment by some reader:
what I dont understand is all this bla bla about, all this can be achived with simple eye glasses, it needs only to tell the optician what he has to do, with this you can not only see 3D on a computer screen but also on any printed media, its amazing, I wont tell you now how to do because than all this guys run to apply patents, which I think they shoulnd get because its so simple it only needs to use the brain a little, it even works with a inkjetprinter output on normal paper.
Moral of the story is: don't smoke pot and post!
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just doing the eye-crossing thing.
Why does this post appear twice? You'd have thought that one of the two CmdrTacos would have caught this goof-up.
Now, if you can find a way to make a genuine 2D laptop, THEN I'd be impressed.
I would love to head over to scene.org to check out some 3d demos on this machine.
The article says your eyes need to 21 inches from the screen and perfectly centered.
You'd look like a big retarded hunch back if you do that in front of a laptop.
HMMM
Maybe pr0n?
pr0n is this display's "killer app"
What I find most notable is that it doesn't work with existing 3D apps and requires some kind of special 3D support.
So essentially, they bothered to make a 3D laptop, but they didn't bother to make it OpenGL or Direct3D compatible. What a waste. Who's gonna want it then.
I've been making 3D models for quite a while now. When this whole sharp thing came up I noticed something. After building a piece of my model, I rotate the model around in the 3d view to see it at various angles. I think the reason I'm doing this is to get a clear idea of what the shape looks like in 3D. If I had stereo view, there's a very good chance I'd find it would speed up my development time. I'd have a clearer idea of what the model looks like.
As you can see, I'm not being very commital about it here. I haven't seen this display so I cannot tell you that it works or not. However, that's more of a technology problem than an application problem. I don't know how other artists would feel about it, though. If it's headache inducing, it won't fly in this market.
"Derp de derp."
I used to own one, and it was a great piece of hardware. The Actius 250 weighed about 3 pounds, 1" thick, and with the extra batteries, could go 8-10 hours between charges.
However, Sharp's support just sucked. No driver updates, no support any OS beyond Win 98, no technical details, nothing. Any problem had one response: wipe the machine, use the recover disk.
Like Sony, they want to sell computers like other consumer electronics. Doesn't work.
Very sad, since their engineering is terrific.
Jonathan
Ummm, the laptop comes with those same nVidia drivers that have been modified to output to the Sharp screen format (instead of red/blue anaglyph) that is how they get the games working. It only does DirectX though, and I didn't think that the 'normal' nVidia stereo drivers worked on OpenGL?
you stole my fucking page widener! asshole!
I can tell that tehy have never fired a read gun before:
"However, three 3-D-enabled Electronic Arts games bundled with our test unit were problematic. On Need for Speed Hot Pursuit 2, we observed vertical bands and ghosting (secondary images); on James Bond 007: Nightfire, the ghosting was severe, and each eye saw not one but two aiming circles, making it hard to rack up a decent kill rate."
Of course you wil see 2 targeting cirles, as you are trying to focus on the targeter and the target "behind" it at the same time. You have the same problem in real life also. It's a limitation of our eyes.
My UID is prime and so is this number: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0.
Browsing the web!..ehh.....
quake!!!!!
PORN!!!!!!!!!!
I agree that it's really nice to have a glasses-free 3D display and all, but until we can direct billions of individual rays of light with laser precision, headset-free 3D will be severely limited. Many of the posters don't seem to quite get the concept of how 3D vision processing works, and thinks that this technology will just get 'better and better'. There are real limitations. For now, such a glasses-free setup will always: 1) halve your brightness and horizontal resolution, putting dark vertical lines over 50% of the screen. 2) work only in very specific sweet spots.
I really believe the future will be in headset displays. The current ones are bulky, but it's more conceivable that new technology will allow for LCD headsets that are light. Also it's only a matter of making things smaller so that we can acheive sufficient resolution for a great-looking, full-view 3D immersion. Two small screens close to each eye is the only way to do it right.
Every plain, vanilla model of mare is always 3D!
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I haven't seen one of these things in person, but the tradeoffs seem fairly bad. They're directing light from alternating columns pixels to each eye. OK, but the separation between your eyes is not really that big... so presumably you couldn't really have this effect working if you moved 3" to the side. Presumably it also degrades noticeably along the way to that 3" of displacement. Maybe I'm overestimating the size of this problem for most people (I am a little fidgety), but this seems pretty restrictive. Also, a question: what's the overal view angle becoming with this directing of column light? I for one thought LCDs with a wide view angle were nice. It doesn't seem to me like the view angle on this one could be very good (while 3d), unless I'm mistaken about how this works. Speaking of which, how does it work? The stuff on Sharp's site is useless. It also seems to me that the image would have to dim, unles somehow their "separation device" is refracting, rather than just blocking light. I don't know anything about LCDs, but gut instinct tells me it's probably just blocking. Assuming I'm right on the last two, that's 3 strikes against the technology. If I'm not, the first one alone seems somewhat awful anyway. Will this really go anywhere? I'd be somewhat surprised.
"Moral of the story is: don't smoke pot and post!"
But then I'd feel left out...
I just had to go out and get one, so I'll be happy to answer any questions. I can report that there are about 15 zones of stereovision as you move your head around the screen. The three or so most central ones are best so 1 - 3 poeople can view good stereo at a time. You need to be about 25 inches from the monitor to get best results as obviously if you are further away the paralax increases to wider than the gap bewteen your eyes so you lose the effect. Any closer and the gaps are too small. I have downloaded a couple of dozen 3D game demos and can say they mostly work quite well (those with anti-aliasing are better) - and while playing you don't drift your head much so you stay in 3D. For $3,300 I have a powerful laptop (I use it as a desktop as it has a DVD writer and everything else you'd want), and a DVD player that will also play 3D movies and games without glasses - I'm happy :)
- Robin.