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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.
Time is a dimension. any good marketing droid can safely claim it is true 3d...
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
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
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.
Hologram is a flat piece of plastic, but by viewing it from different angles, you can see different objects, stuff hidden behind other stuff etc. Just as if it was a "window into another world". By mounting a cube of 6 correctly aligned holograms, you can allow viewing an object from all directions.
Still, with holograms there are two major problems (and several minor, like lighting etc). One is focus - you see sharply what the camera took sharply. Background is usually blurred. And the other is amount of data contained and needed to be generated, plus resolution comparable to light wave size, which causes mostly every electronic application impossible - just not enough bandwidth and no small enough pixels to create a holograms on the fly.
BTW, make a hologram of a hologram: Result: the pictured image appears 'in front of the plastic', like floating in air, on your side.
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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.
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?
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.
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.
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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.
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