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3D Display, No Glasses Required

Posted by timothy on from the lucas-had-this-in-1977 dept.

Shibatch writes "Hitachi, Ltd has developed a 3D display called Transpost which can be viewed from any direction without wearing special glasses. 3D movies can be seen as floating in the display. Also, 3D movies captured at other places can be shown on the display in realtime. The principle of the device is that 2D images of an object taken from 24 different directions are projected to a special rotating screen. They also developed a camera which can capture images from 24 directions simultaneously." The pictures are interesting, but ... translations, anyone?

2 of 285 comments (clear)

  1. 3D *movies*? by JessLeah · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It seems to me like a system such as this would be rather inappropriate for watching movies. For one thing, making a device any much larger than a normal-sized tube TV would start to get really impractical, as the spinny elements would start to generate a lot of noise (and you WOULD NOT want to be there if a large, high-speed spinning element broke off of its axis and started ricocheting about the room...).

    Also, unlike conventional holograms, you would not be able to "touch" the image. Reach out to touch these images, and the rotate-o-thingy will lop your hand off.

    I shudder to think of the safety (and power consumption, and noise) issues that would be involved in making a movie-screen-sized version of one of these...

    Something like this is probably more useful for scientific and military visualization. I know it's corny, but think of the Star Wars-like 3D display in South Park, in the scene where Bill Gates gets shot by the army guy. Something like that display machine...

    --
    Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
  2. Porn is the killer app. by kiwioddBall · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You may be moderating this as funny but that is the most serious/insightful comment you will see here.

    If you think about it, it is going to be really hard to show scenery ie mountain landscapes on this screen - you can only show objects standing in a void - the demo piccies here show a man standing in the middle of nowhere. Think about Star Wars and Princess Leia standing in the middle of nowhere in R2's projection - there are no walls around her...

    So if you think about it, the only real use for this are artificial landscapes like Air Traffic Control displays, and people.

    Porn is _the_ killer app for this one.