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3D Flat Panel With No Glasses
m4c north writes "From Japan Today: 'Toshiba Corp said Friday it has developed a brand-new flat-display that allows viewers to see three-dimensional images without using special glasses. The display is expected to be applied to arcade games, virtual menus at restaurants and simulations of buildings and landscapes. The company said it aims to commercialize the display within two years.' JCN Network offers a few more details than Japan Today's rather short summary. And Toshiba's [toshiba.co.jp] press release has some simple figures. Maybe pinball will make a comeback!"
I have 20/400 vision in my left eye. Because of that, I perceive almost everything with my right eye. As a kid, this made taskes such as hitting a baseball or catching a football exceedingly difficult because I have piss-poor depth perception. It almost made those red & blue "3D" movies pointless for me. Will this mean that I can't read any informational displays that use this type of tech in the future?
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Lets do an back of envelope calculation, they are so fun...
Lets suppose a 90 degree viewing angle (both horizontal and vertical) with 1' degree quantization. Thats 29 thousand times as much information as a 2d display with similar resolution and color depth. Compression of the video signal from the source to TV would be absolutely mandatory.
If we assume that each voxel can emmit a maximum of 32 virtual photons per screen refresh rate than we get roughly only 64 times as much information, 32 times as many pixels plus 26-32 extra bits per pixel to describe the emmision degree. This would be much more feasible but then we still need to know which of the numerous viewing directions contains a receiver (eye ball) and then we can only handle 16 viewers (enough for non-theatrical viewing)
Couple this with the difficulty of crafting such a physical device it would be far easier just to go the matrix route and plug-in.
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This will probably be much the same, another attempt that falls just short. I predict 3D will take off big time when very small, very light weight, very high resolution headsets arrive, whether LCD or scanning micro-laser or whatever.
Despite my pessimism I think we should plan for a 3D future now. I doubt the HD-DVD people or Blu-Ray camp will see this post, but they should build in 3D compliance now. Since digital compression is about encoding similarities between frames, it should work well to compress two nearly identical images to one probably only adding a 10 percent overhead for a film shot in 3D. All players should be able to read a 3D title, ignoring the 3D enhancement data on standard players. Blu-Ray especially would have both the capacity and bandwidth to pull this off, in fact imagine the Marketing coo a Playstation 3D would be. I'll bet you wouldn't have to change most off the shelf 3D games to be true 3D in true stereovision if the hardware is done right. Existing titles transformed to a more immersive experience overnight.
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Remember the flickering 3D glasses for Sega's old Master System? They were pretty good. It'd be great if a modern game console had something like that.
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Any that require 3D models to show what is required. CAD/CAM applications, any one doing 3D rendering, showcases for new homes, medical software (teaching that is), etc.
The "average" user won't, however, have any use for this until computer games start using it, but then again, thats the whole reason why we have faster computers now isn't it?
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You would have a hard time finding someone who wants autostereoscopy to look good than me. I've bought three different sets of LCD shutter glasses, installed and tweaked ungodly numbers of drivers, and partially went to SIGGRAPH simply to see the state of the art in the technology.
As of September, 2004, it's all awful. I've seen the Sharp Laptop. I've seen the X3D display. I've seen every attempt to create 3D without glasses, and they're all embarassingly bad. One inch of depth does not 3D make, especially not at the cost of visually hideous artifacts (half the horizontal resolution means you end up looking at these double width, very blocky pixels). There was one exception, which used several stacked layers to simulate 3D without attempting to use lensing. The depth was still awful but it didn't hurt at all to look at. Of course, you'd never notice any depth from a distance.
Of course, it's not just lensing that's problematic. I got strapped into not one but two HMD-based systems -- one, a swimming simulator, the other a fairly cool cockpit simulation with per-finger force feedback gloves. Both systems looked cool from the outside, but having played with this stuff off and on since the days of Amiga-based Arcade VR (what *was* the name of that system?) I can tell you it hasn't gotten much better. I wanted it to be immersive, but...no.
Really, the only display tech that really blew me away used dual rear projectors that fed back into one another to achieve alignment, then emitted polarized light onto a single screen. With very light and simple glasses, the effect was utterly seamless.
I vaguely remember the spinning display approach also worked.
--Dan
best experience I had was with polarized light systems, but I don't really have access to those. Shutter glasses aren't great, they really kill the 3d effect, I don't know why. What anyone can afford is red-blue glasses, that is if you don't mind looking at the stuff in "black-and-white" (your brain really gets used to it and the color's dont matter so much). In the old times I made a really simple DOS game using this. You also used to have driver support for that and I remember playing quake, but I remember they didn't get it all right. Also the real angle of view doesn't match what it is displayed on your screen (I think by default in quake the hfov is 90degrees, while the real one is about half as that, which makes people that are not used to it sick at first)
Even people with normal stereoscopic vision can have problems with this.
I took a helicopter up to a glacier in Alaska once. It's so vast and has so little foreground that you can't judge distance.
I asked the tour guide, since we had an hour up there if I could walk the quarter mile or so over to a waterfall that was several hundred feet high.
He explained to me that it was five miles away and a quarter mile high. There was absolutely no way for me to judge the distance properly so my brain basically made up a distance based on experience, which turned out to be dead wrong.
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