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More 3D Displays to Come
Anonymous Writer writes "The first laptop using an autostereo display to show images in 3D without special glasses was the Sharp Mebius PC-RD3D in Japan, later released in the US as the Sharp Actius RD3D. NEC has a line of computers with autostereo displays as well. They are the NEC Valuestar T VT900/8D desktop, the LaVie S LS900/9E laptop, and LaVie RX LR700/8E laptop. The line uses NEC's SoundVu technology that uses the display as a speaker! Autostereo displays are becoming more popular according to Martyn Williams and Tom Krazit from the IDG News Service. In their article in PC World, they claim laptops are just the start of it. A new satellite service by Mobile Broadcasting will be broadcasting 3D content to handheld devices in Japan some time soon. Another player in this market is Dynamic Digital Depth (mentioned in a previous post of mine), whose content services convert 2D video to 3D for display in this medium. Sanyo may be releasing 50-inch Plasma Displays that can display 3D. MIT's Media Laboratory is developing a more advanced 3D display, calling it a full resolution autostereoscopic display, that would allow a viewer to walk around and not lose the 3D effect, which current autostereo displays can't do."
If only the images could be made solid and warm to the touch!
http://pymol.sourceforge.net/
... that carry these 3D display laptops? I'd like to actually see the damned things before I buy one, you know!
:)
And wow, 1.3 hours of battery life. Looks like I'd need to get a really long extension cord to retain portability.
This would be extremely useful, especially in the CAD community. While I only know a little about the area of CAD and manufacturing, this combined with the inkjet plastics printing (I forget the term for it) or rapid prototyping machines would be really neat. Imagine designing something, and being able to view it in 3D from all angles (instead of a render), and then sending it to be printed off. I've never seen one of these 3D displays before; how are the objects rendered? How much processing power is needed to create such a display, especially from a 3D model? I'm sure it needs to be rendered first, but what about a flat-shading 3D program like Autodesk Inventor? 3D displays would be neat for new GUIs. Instead of having a flat 3D desktop, you could have a true 3D desktop. That would be interesting to see...
I don't want to be an smartass... but the SoundVu technology is not property of NEC, it was developed by NXT... just a word...
Traditionally the 3D demo object of choice is a teapot.
If you click on the Sharp Actius RD3D link and then click "Where to Buy", they show you the direct-from-the-manufacturer cost and allow you to purchase it.
If it's worth it, I'd buy it. It's running at $2,999.00 at this moment. Can't really tell if it's worth it by looking at a picture of it over the Internet, though.
"This would be extremely useful, especially in the CAD community. While I only know a little about the area of CAD and manufacturing, this combined with the inkjet plastics printing (I forget the term for it) or rapid prototyping machines would be really neat. Imagine designing something, and being able to view it in 3D from all angles (instead of a render), and then sending it to be printed off."
Figured since I'm a 3D artist, you wouldn't mind if I chimed in. Would a stereoscopic display help me? If the display is convincing enough, yes! Right now, while I'm modelling, I'm constantly rotating the model around, sometimes just slightly, just to get a sense of the parallax. This gives me a clue as to what vertices are where. A stereo display could potentially relieve me from needing to rotate it as much. If that's true, I could get more detail on the screen without worrying about the vid card not being powerful enough for what I'm doing.
I wish I could tell you for a fact that it would or wouldn't work, but I've yet to experience stereoscopic work-flow. I am rather curious, though.
"Derp de derp."