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.

Comments

Why do people say

[Pingular]

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...

Re:Why do people say

[lanswitch]

Time is a dimension. any good marketing droid can safely claim it is true 3d...

Re:Why do people say

[TeknoHog]

Because it can give an illusion of a 3D world. Then again, even a 2D image can give a pretty good illusion.

IMHO it's important to see (pun intended) that vision in a 3D world is fundamentally 2D. A ray of light is 1D; this takes away that one dimension. The human retina is effectively a 2D surface. In an n-dimensional world, vision is (n-1)-dimensional.

It helps a little that humans have two of those 2D eyes, but it doesn't make vision fully 3D (physical impossibility as explained above). Therefore a parallax-based system can give a perfectly good illusion; it's not fully 3D, but we don't need it to be as our vision is so limited.

On the other hand, things change when you move your head. You can't peek behind the image. However, it is possible if the head position is being tracked and the image changes accordingly. I've experienced one such system, it used LCD shutter glasses whose position was tracked via radio waves. A friend at the local university showed me a molecular simulation with this system, it was pretty kewl. The only limitation was that it used a single flat screen, but they are planning to extend it to cover every wall of a room to give full 3D immersion.

Great potential in more than one context

[Raindance]

Just think of what spooky things those virus writers could do with this thing!

RD

Ah yes

[The Cat]

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.

Change of focus...

[whiteranger99x]

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 ;)

3D my ass.

[SharpFang]

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.

Re:3D my ass.

[Daniel Dvorkin]

[shrug] 2.5D, maybe?

I mean, fine, it's not true 3D. But it's still a hell of an advance in display technology. True, open-air, walk-around 3D projection would be very very cool, but for most of the applications that people want 3D display for right now, this is a big step in the right direction.

Obviously there's plenty of room for improvement. You should be able to "tilt your head to see it from different angle," I agree. I'd say a reasonable standard is that the illusion of depth should be maintainable anywhere from 1 to 3 feet away from the screen, and with the viewer's head positioned directly in front of any part of the screen including the edges. If they can get that down ... well, as far as I'm concerned, they've pulled off a miracle.

Re:3D my ass.

[SharpFang]

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.

gl / directx

[dollargonzo]

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

Re:gl / directx

[iantri]

Actually, this lends itself to an interesting question. Software like the aforementioned wicked3d or SciTech's GLDirect allows users to see "3D" (actually stereo images) in any game that uses 3D acellerated graphics (DirectX/OpenGL) using either red/blue anaglyph glasses or LCD shutters.

What I'm wondering is does this notebook come with the appropriate drivers to interpret the standard DirectX calls (like the above programs) and display any game in stereo or does the game have to be specifically written for it?

parallax

[penguinoid]

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)

Stereo, not 3D.

[iantri]

This only provides stereo images, not 3D.

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.

3D? I'm still waiting for a 2D system!

[meckardt]

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.

Obviously not done with nVidia!

[totzta]

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.

Glasses

[rf0]

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

checked those out at Telecom'2003 in Geneva: nice

[Lol the unbeliever]

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

A wonder for people with two eyes

[TechnoWeeniePas]

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?

Re:A wonder for people with two eyes

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, this I can speak to! I also have only one good eye, And I work with 3D graphics. While it is a bit of a pain to set up sometimes, we use our VR system in stereoscopic 3D sometimes. I can't see it because only my left eye works. i can of course understand the math, and also see each images (left and right), but I cant see the depth created by viewing the images correctly. For people with only one good eye stereo images are mostly useless.

-tim

AnandTech also has coverage

[Anonymous Coward]

AnandTech also covered this monitor at COMDEX.

http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.html?i=1924

Caught in a Catch .22

[Captain Beefheart]

Looks like they hobbled themselves by choosing a niche format DVD burner, a full-sized Pentium 4 Volcano, and 2 hours of battery time--and almost 12 pounds of travel weight for only a 15" screen. Hopefully this product won't fail and they won't blame the failure on the tech instead of their unappetizing hardware loadout.

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.

Re:Caught in a Catch .22

[Captain Beefheart]

Furthermore, the cost of the 3d tech has to be more than "the low hundreds of dollars," which we will peg at $300. I just priced an Alienware laptop which has:

--1024MB of RAM vs. 512MB
--Mobility Radeon 9600 128MB vs. GeForce4 440 Go (64MB?), the mobile version of the MX cards
--8MB cache 60 GB 7200 RPM Hitachi vs. standard generic 60GB drive
--4x2x8x DVD-RW vs. DVD-RAM drive
--16.1" 1600x1200 UXGA vs. 15" 1024x768 XGA

...and it was still about $125 less!!!

So either the tech costs a lot more than they're willing to admit, or they're hiking the price because people will pay for the gimmick. I think Sharp has confused themselves with The Sharper Image.

One developer's experience

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Neck strain

[dpbsmith]

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.

That is a peculiar eye position for a laptop

[cfish]

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.

Arrrrgh

[I kan Spl]

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.