Slashdot Mirror
Multi-layer LCD Displays
Jmo writes "Puredepth has started to produce multi-layer LCD displays. They manipulate LCD technology so that one screen can be placed behind another for actual depth. This technology has not even come close to being fully taken advantage of but it is still very interesting and has many implications for the future. Their main product right now is a seventeen inch monitor, the MLD-3000. It is mainly targeted at medical and business fields but it could be used all over."
I think is a very god piece of hardware but at that price ($1,799.00), i think that a few years will have to pass until we`ll start using it at home.
Think like a hacker, act like a hacker, but never become a hacker !
I've been wanting to purchase an LCD, but I've been waiting for one to be as big and bulky as a CRT.
"It could be used all over."
Like pr0n right?
Come on, some one was going to say it.
The preceding message was based on actual events. Only the names, locations and events have been changed.
Well, I'm sure this will be discussed in much more detail on Monday when the dupe will be posted.
However, I do see a use in this for GIS applications. You can redefine the term overlay with this.
Iran captures three CIA agents
as too all this research and product development into 3D displays. It didnt work in the cinema and personally I cant think of a compelling mainstream requirement for 3D on the desktop.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
http://www.nintendo.com/systemsclassic?type=vb
:)
If you have something that can be separated into near field and far field, the images could be very realistic. I have trouble imagining how this would work with a medical image. Remember the anatomy drawings with a series of plastic overlays.
The stuff I like the best is some mechanical drawings with cutaway views. A good illustrator can totally convey a 3-d structure. I guess what I am saying is that the answer may be a little more cleverness with conventional 2-d displays. The use of user-controlled transparency might do a better job of conveying the information.
Is anyone still working on holographic displays?
Wasting two full LCD displays on getting two blurry discrete depths is not a good use of hardware. If you expend the same amount of effort on a true 3D display, you can do the same thing, and you can actually look at arbitrary 3D objects/scenes.
The practical applications that Puredepth advertises for its MLD displays are vast and far-reaching. In any application that would benefit from greater information density (such as backgrounds with changing overlays, work areas with tool palettes, etc.), the MLD adds true depth to what would usually be a simulated effect. The effect is truly amazing, especially when compared with a standard 2D display.
As you can see, this device is a GREAT benefit to the vast and far-reaching applications that would benefit from it. We could name them, but we'll settle for describing them abstractly. Suppose you have an application where you need to stack crap on top of other crap so that you can't read any of it. Well, this device is exactly what you need!
Seriously, take a look at the screenshot of this thing running:
Stacking crap so you can't read it
In that pic, you can read everything, but it is clear that if you use your computer for things like text, this would be a nearly unusable monitor.
I love the article's conclusion:
Also, the technology, once refined, could be applied to displays with many layers, allowing for even more complex three-dimensional diagrams, such as skyscraper floor-plans, or "data clouds" with more than merely two levels within the depth hierarchy.[Poster's note: HOLY CRAP A 3D DISPLAY? THAT WOULD CHANGE THE WORLD IF it wasn't 25 years old.] Yet another possibility would be to juxtapose two or more different display formats in the same manner. Using a combination of standard LCD displays with super-bright OLED displays might lead to some interesting effects, making the distinguishing factors between layers consist of more factors than merely depth.
As innovators, I tip my hat to Puredepth, and I truly hope to see more products from them in the future.
i heard it has cheaper production cost and better quality.
by Philips uses more conventional technology. You just interleave the pixels of the alternate views.
Because the LCDs are layered, there is a certain amount of parallax. You can't see it in the shots, of course.
This means that if you have a picture of an x-ray on the bottom layer and you put the labels for that x-ray on the upper layer, the labels will appear to float over the x-ray. This a a Good Thing.
There are countless situations in which putting a label over a picture obscures part of the data, making it hard to read. Here, because of parallax between your eyes, at least one eye will usually see the pixels under a label. If that weren't enough you could move your head side to side.
Obviously it would be stupid to put text over text. That isn't the intended use.
I'd really like such a monitor for working in Photoshop. The marching ant line around a selection can make it really hard to see whether the selection is lined up. Either putting the selection line on a second LCD layer or actually lifting the current selection up onto that layer would be very useful.
But you're just going to have to imagine the effect until you see it... it'll never show up in a photograph of the unit.
One is left with all the problems of having dual-monitors and none of the benefits.
Hmm, I think I will file this story under:
"Sounds Cool"
subfolder "Probably Useless"
subfolder "What Moron Thought We Needed This?"
Thanks!
Yes, this is another article from none other than the self-promoting twit, Sal Cangeloso. At least he's taken off that ridiculous About page from his site, where he christened himself as the CEO of XYZ Computing. It's a fucking blog page for fucks sake.
I wouldn't be surprised if he submitted this article himself. At least he did a better job disguising his identity this time round.
this could be interesting if the depth between the 2 displays was enough so you could "switch" between them by refocussing your eyes, like wathing through a fence.
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
However the article says: "Several quirks related to the product's design make it somewhat impractical for generalized use."
Slashdot has reached a new level of article posting. Now the poster doesn't have to RTFA anymore.
Why is it news when another company jumps on the 3D using parallax bandwagon?
Sharp has done it, Toshiba has done it. All three are using the same layered LCD technology. Slashdot has covered each one now
BB
Okay, this is a longshot, but could something like the foveon sensor be applied to LCDs? How long before we get real square pixels from RGB or RGBE stacked LCDs?
bundaegi is good for you
Seems like most of the naysayers are just assuming you'd use this screen to simply overleave two 2D displays.
This is linear thinking- sort of like assuming that the powerful GPUs in video cards would only ever be used to render chrome spheres floating over checkerboard floors. Instead, different, more clever uses (like Quartz and Core Image) have emerged for that seemingly extravagant and surplus capability.
Similarly, I fell like somthing like this will be used to add an intangible quality to the dry 2d display- 'life' or 'vibrance.'
Imagine two displays that render the exact same image, except in the areas where it's tracking your eyes or mouse, the images are more in phase while the rest of the screen goes out of phase.
It could literally help focus your attention on the important info, where today's screens are limited to color, 'boldness' and opacity.
I think we won't see the real usefluness of this until it's had time for creative people to tinker with working examples of it, which is the case for most technology, really.
Marc Siry || interactive media professional, motorcycle enthusiast ||
from reading the potential applications for a layered LCD, it seems to me that just writing a display driver which supports two desktops and make white pixels in the foreground transparent would be much more effective.
i think the only advantage you'd get from having layered LCD is a realistic sense of depth which doesn't seem to have many practical uses in the first place, and could probably be simulated with some creative display rendering techniques(like darken/blur the background desktop slightly).
plus, with a software driver that accomplished practically the same thing you'd:
-save a ton of money
-be able to choose which color pixils you want to be transparent
-make semi-opaque layers or make different shades of translucency
-implement as many layered desktops as you want
Now I just need to go to the ATM Machine to get cash to buy one. I'd like one to use with my MIDI Interface, but I hope I have enough RAM Memory in my CPU Unit.
I don't see what you gain here using a hardware implementation of this. Surely it is possible to otherwise do this entirely in software (which would certainly be more elegant) or even by blending two DVI signals?
Like this, you end up with one display being a little fuzzy, and it just looks confusing to me.
The article really doesn't sell it either - "It's good cos you can have toolbars and pallettes" - done in software - "The box looks cool" - great, I'd expect it to look good if I paid that much.
Someone explain why? What can it be used for?
Well, it would certanly be great for audio visualizations... Run it w/ two computers, each one running milkdrop on linein data... That'd be interesting to say the least. /me wants one of these monitors now.
~n
If IY was a PC:
/bin/sh: command not found
[InuYasha]~$ sit
but the damned store only had one monitor plugged in
If you have nothing useful to say post as AC.
You MUST be Bill Gates.
it's not considered "defective" unless there are 8 dead pixels on each layer.
I've seen layered LCDs before. They have them installed at the Science Fiction Museum in Seattle. On the lower level, they have a really cool interactive exhibit where you can browse their 3D database of famous spaceships from the history of sci-fi. It definitely uses some kind of multi-layered display (I assume LCD.) It looks extremely cool and sci-fi-ish, but like everyone else, I'm not sure what the real practical applications would be other than sci-fi...
To avoid unnecessary banners and wasting bandwidth, click on page 4 at the bottom of the page. Page 4 has the screenshots of the monitor in action.
(Unless you want to see the other pics, and in that case knock yourself out)
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
When there is actual depth in the display, as done here, your brain immediately and automatically recognizes this and perceives the distinction between front and rear images. I suspect this is a much more striking effect than merely alpha-blending overlapping windows and/or making the 'deeper' windows blurry. Software -cannot- replicate what this product does.
That said, I'm as baffled as anyone about the true practical uses for this, other than perhaps a more eye-catching display in a store window.
.. when they're using full colour stacked OLEDs (no i didnt rtfa)
During an industrial-design project at university a few years back we figured this would be nice gadgety technology for a smartphone. Good to see its getting development now.
Just buy an old-school LCD panel for overhead projectors and duct tape it to the front of your CRT...
I'm actually pretty disappointed that those LCD panels went the way of the dodo bird. They were pretty cool, and I dare say more convenient than integrated projectors (since with the old panels you could use dual-use the projector for.... overheads!)
-- Marcio
Great, now I can be even more dissapointed when my new layered LCD has dead pixels in all 3 dimensions.
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
I can see that there might be occasional military applications where it actually makes sense, because you really really really don't want the different data streams on the same computer (e.g. the CNN feed on the background and the crosshairs for the satellite laser aiming system in the foreground :-) and need more control than a multi-level-secure operating system can really provide. And there might be occasional gamer applications where nobody makes a video card hefty enough to blend the two images while running full-blast computation on both sets of image processing. But that's all weird minor niche stuff.
I really don't get it. It doesn't sound like the screen depth is enough to let your eyes see really different things, unlike some of the parallax monitor stuff that's been in the news.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
If they could have picked any colour for the see-through colour, it should have been something other than white. See the screenshot they provide which shows just how bad it is when a web browser with Google on it is in front of another window.
Surely some colour like RGB(4,0,4) would be fairly uncommon, and a little more safe. Colours like that tend to be used for video overlays already, so they should work fine.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
LCDs are designed to filter out the light coming through them. Black (RGB 0,0,0) would block all light, red (RGB 255,0,0) would block all but red, and of course white (RGB 255,255,255) lets everything through. You can't assign RGB (4,0,4) as transparent as the LCD surface would only let through ~1.6% of red and blue light, hardly transparent.
I personally think this display is a cheap hack, not worth $1,799. You could buy two LCD displays, disassemble them and stack them if you're savvy enough. I've never tried it, but it obviously can be done. The hard part would be taking off the panel backing without destroying the display.
About four or five years ago we did some development for a company from New Zealand called DeepVideo. They had a screen that was two LCD displays with one in front of the other.
Basically it was connected to by a dual head video card, and you basically had is spanned. The first half was on the front screen, the second was on the back.
LOL, I just looked up deepvideo and its the same guys. I guess its a re-release or something.
My experience with the original displays were that they we neat, but not terribly useful. Hopefully over the last few years they got it nice and crisp.
But new, nope they've been doing it for years.
Is that kind of like a liquid crystal display display? I bit like these ATM machines I've been hearing about?
I think that before getting 3d on monitors, we should solve the problem of those monitors not displaying the vivid range of colors that the eye can percieve. If you know a bit about digital compositing, you've probably heard about HDR, and I personally think this is the next logical step in monitors. There's at least one company, who was kind enough to show us a demo unit where I work, who's working on that. Basically, they have two panels : a regular 1600x1200 LCD panel, and a panel comprised of about a thousand while LEDs. So, instead of having a backlight that illuminates the whole screen at same intensity, they have this LED grid that gets brighter in certain areas or tones itself down off in others. This way you can achieve true blacks and really bright whites(think about the sun kind of whites). I've seen a regular monitor and an HDR display next to each other (based on the same NEC LCD), and I've got to tell you, this is really the future. After seeing this, I'll take better colors over 3d any day of the week.
You could map white to RGB(255,255,254), and then map some other colour like RGB(4,0,4) to white.
I'm not entirely certain why this would be so hard to do, either, although two of you seem to think it is.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
No, RGB(255,255,254) is actually somewhere near white. So it would be black next on a nearly white background.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!