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

[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.

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)

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.