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!"

Comments

Vision impairments

[XorNand]

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?

Lensing Is Awful

[Effugas]

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