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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!"
Can we view pictures on our 2D monitors?
I dunno about pinball, but we could have some rocking porn.
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I thought there'd been monitors out that do this for a while? Wasn't there a laptop with this tech?
But I liked those red and blue glasses! They made me look cool...
Reading at high threshold levels is group-think.
Sharp has had 3D Displays that don't require glasses for some time now.
These faux 3D moniters sound nice and all, but I can't really see the big use of it. In specialized ways like the examples stated they sound good, but for games and regular applications it's probably useless. We're not talking holograms here, it's just basically what you see on a cheezy 3D film just without the glasses. I'm more intrested in the day when digital paper is cheap and effective. Imagine layering a room with this, and getting images on all 6 sides, and playign things such as an FPS, or RPG. Even adapting movies and such would be quite useful.
If you RTFA, it becomes evident that this display technology isn't the same as Sharp's 3D LCD. Sharp's display requires you to be in center of the display, and at a certain distance, and the 3D effect works by projecting steroscopic images at each eye. They direct two different screen images essentially, but it's still the same old trick, just without glasses, instead, a diffusion filter angles the output to each eye.
From this article, it seems as if each pixel is a microlens that redirects the display to your two eyes on a per-lightwave basis. This obviously allows a much wider viewing angle, and for multiple viewers, while still creating the illusion of depth.
Anyone have a link to the screen shots? I really would love to see how good the 3d effect is.
Robert
Bet this
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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This will pop-up ads to a whole new dimension.
There will come a day when you witness a 3D goatse, and then you will surely regret this.
not these, but i've seen a model from these guys on a fair in helsinki in late 1999. i always thought it would be nice to have a 3d display that worked without glasses, and all of a sudden i found myself standing right in front of one. it was quite impressive, good image quality and yes, a convincing effect. only when i moved my head it took a very short moment to retrack my eyes and readjust the prisms (there are prisms in front of each vertical pixel row. they direct the light so that one eye sees the even and the other the odd numbered pixel columns). the guy peresenting it told me they had played quake III on it :)
i came across their displays again on cebit a few years later, there also were some by the fraunhofer institute (the ones i've seen are probably not on the page, they had one or two that tracked your eyes and adjusted to your position, and one that only worked at a specific position, iirc).
anyway, while searching for the seereal link above, i came across this list of 3d displays, there even are price quotes for a few.
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