Slashdot Mirror
First Shareable Interactive Display
Jeremy Newton writes "I want to share with you a new device that allows multiple moving images to be displayed to several users from the same screen at the same time. The project is called a "Shift in Time," my thesis project for NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program. The driving goal of this project was to end fighting over the remote control, the gamepad, or the keyboard. It also makes room for new applications in marketing, games, and education. Recently it's gotten some buzz on Engadget.com."
This is great; Now, if only someone makes multiple streams of sound riding on the same speaker...
How about using it in the bank industry? The bank equips the ATM's with this, makes sure that the user is informed that he should sit strictly in front. Then the ATM displays "bait" information on all sides except the front side.
Or, use the Imax like glasses, and flick between images on the screen every refresh, and have the glasses blackout for every other image, so you again only see the images you want.
Oh, and to top it off, you set up your speakers really carefully so that there's interference, and a node (no sound) from one source for person A, and a node from the other source for person B!
Then again, it's probably easier just to use two screens and two headphones :)
Physicist, consultant, science communicator
Wow, this kid is a one-man PR machine -- gets his page on Slashdot and Engadget, complete with his own videos promoting his work.
I'm not trying to be mean, I'm just amused and rather impressed, actually. =)
as the time goes, the tv will probably become less and less social activity...
We all know the porn industry is going to benefit from this, in some very, very, very kinky way. Probably, pre and post op pictures.
Or just have a game open for you, and goatse for everyone else. Or the other way around, whichever way you swing.
- shazow
Well, as for practical applications, I can see 2:
since this lens would be very cheap to produce, it might be interesting to see a lens packaged with a video game to allow head-to-head play on the same TV without traditional split-screen. (the TV would need to be high-definition to achieve any sort of usable resolution, and the game could present an interface to calibrate the image interlacing granularity and alignment so that the lens could be used on different sized displays.)
The second practical use is a stereoscopic display without the need for red/blue, polarized, or shutter glasses. I think there is already a company that produces these, at some ungodly price...
We were doing almost the same thing over 12 years ago a Georgia Tech using polarized glasses and an active shutter on the screen. Could not really find any useful application for it...
I think this would also be great for collaborative code writing. One person sits on one side, writing the code, while the other person looks at the spec/API. Need to check some? Just tilt your head to the other side.
- A
...however, I'm failing to see the practical impact of his work...
You're new to Slashdot, aren't you?
Relax. If you RTFS you will see this is for "NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program", not the engineering department. So the guy is probably a tech-savvy artist rather than an art-savvy techie. And if you download the thesis you'll see that it is in fact "A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF PROFESSIONAL STUDIES in INTERACTIVE TELECOMMUNICATIONS at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University"
So don't worry. You can still be proud of your engineering PhD when you get it.
Still, you have to admit that even though the underlying tech is nothing new, he does present some fairly novel usage cases for it. Of course most of them are fairly pointless like "let's collaborate together by looking at completely different things on the same screen". But the idea does seem to make sense for something like the split screen mode in 2-player video-games. If you can only have 512x768 pixels out an XGA display for your view, wouldn't you rather have those spread over the whole screen than squished onto one half of it, like they typically do? And if the other guy can't see what you're doing, all the better.
Anyway the point is these lenticular screen 3D monitors that various companies are starting to make may have a variety of interesting uses beyond just displaying 3D imagery. Exploring those ideas is probably worth a master's degree in "professional studies," whatever that is.
What is it with the recent self-promotional use of /.? Next week, I'm going to try to get my own research on Slashdot: It is a liquid crystal display designed to be used by a man and cat, simultaneously. I call it kittiplexing, and it shows the human user their normal Windows XP desktop while showing a bouncing ball around the screen for the benefit of the cat. It requires that the cat wear a head-mounted optical unit I call the Digital Light Directing Optic. But once you strap it to the pussy, you just keep getting Windows until the batteries run out on the DLDO.