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Acer To Launch 3D Notebook In October?
An anonymous reader writes "Acer is planning to announce a 3D notebook computer by end of October. If Acer indeed comes out with a 3D laptop then it'll be the world's first manufacturer to do so. The most interesting thing about Acer's machine is that it requires no special glasses. The 15.6-inch notebook features built-in software which can convert regular 2D movies to 3D and directly support 3D movies." Update: 06/08 23:18 GMT by T : According to the linked story, the no-glasses version is still in the works; the current iteration does still require special glasses.
Sharp produced a 3D laptop in early 2005.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/115348/sharps_3d_notebook.html
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/22/042253
with a no-glasses display, even. I saw one at a conference expo,
it worked pretty well for molecular graphics/viz stuff. But they never
caught on.
That doesn't make it 4 dimensional.
It has to span multiple points along the time axis to be dimensional in that regard.
And you are talking about the second generation. The Actius RD3D was released a year earlier. So, this Acer is not the first 3D laptop in the sense that it exists in 3 dimensions, it is not the first 3D laptop in the sense of having a 3D capable display, maybe there is another usage of the term 3D?
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The easiest way to get a stereo 3D movie is actually by taking advantage of camera motion.
1. Detect camera motion
2. Detect the direction
3. Detect the velocity
4. display frame t=N for one eye
5. display frame t=+-x for the other eye, depending on 2, and x depending on 4.
If you've got the movie Swordfish, you can apply this technique to the action sequence in the beginning where a camera orbits the scene. In fact, try here*:
http://tinypic.com/player.php?v=2a6tw82&s=5
It's in cross-eyed stereoscopic format, so just cross your eyes, focus, and enjoy the scene in stereoscopic 3D.
It also shows (slightly) the pitfalls...
1. If there's no camera motion, this doesn't work.
2. If there's too much non-camera motion, this shows ghosting (as e.g. a person will be in place A at t=N, and place B at t=N+x)
3. If there's any post effects, they will stick out like a sore thumb if they are not accurately composited in. In that video, for example, the explosion-y bits halfway in look like they're kind of floating at a place in the scene they shouldn't be. It doesn't show so much in the original (just watch either left/right alone), but it shows up easily once made stereoscopic 3d.
It is a cute method, just not well-suited to any and all movies at all.
Other methods that might be employed are detecting fog and using the fog as a depth cue, or parent poster's method; but that will take a more hefty processor (most of the above steps can easily be derived from e.g. an mpeg processor, which already does motion estimation).
( *original material copyright Village Roadshow Pictures, Silver Pictures, NPV Entertainment and Jonathan Krane Group and Warner Bros (distributor). Broadcast by SBS Broadcasting, a subsidiary of ProSiebenSat.1 Media AG. Used only to demonstrate a 2D to stereographic 3D conversion method, for educational purposes. )
It's not "true" surround sound, it doesn't mystically divine information that isn't there anymore. That is, when you turn your head you don't hear what you would have heard if you've done so with the actual source, if applicable.
So, no, it's impossible for them to have something that can guess to any believable sight what depth every part of an image it should be.
I second that call on bullshit.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
Yes, but keep in mind that the lenticular cover is typically permanent (if it's not, you have to *very carefully* re-align any time you put it back over the screen).. which means your resolution is cut in half at best (say, every even vertical column of pixels for the left eye, every odd vertical column for the right eye). And even if you don't move your head very much, go find a lenticular display or even just one of those little cards that came in cereal boxes or whatever.. the smallest movement can cause ghosting at best, or flipping at worst. What I mean by 'the smallest movement' is, roughly, half the distance between your eyes at the ideal distance (yes, every lenticular display also has an ideal distance). I'm sure you'll agree, that's not a lot of distance at all.
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2D Movies into 3D is partially bunk - see posts up above.
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CG Movies *can* be made in '3D' (stereoscopic) and *are* being made in 3D. See: Beowulf, Caroline, Up, etc. Speaking of Pixar... soon to come: Toy Story 1 (and 2, I think), re-done in 3D.
Don't think it costs 'almost nothing', though.
It effectively doubles your rendertime - at 8 hours to a day per frame for some scenes, that's something to cinsider (they probably have more than double the speed now that they did back then, but there ya go).
But moreover, you have to plan your scenes much more carefully. You don't want thinks popping into screen for the left eye but not for the right eye. If you're doing any post-process compositing, all of your effects have to be composited into a 3D space, as any cheat of "eh, this looks about right" on a single 2D plate, when transferred to two 2D plates, can cause the effect to either float in front of where it should be, or sit behind it... both are very confusing for the brain to deal with (the latter more so).
All this takes plenty of additional man-hours (artists, but even the tech guys who keep the farm up and running, for example). That's also partially why more and more 'CG' studios are trying to get things out of the rendering pipeline directly with as little need for post-compositing as possible. Color keying and such you can do on both plates at the same time without issue, of course.
Actually, it is real - Sharp made them years ago - no glasses required, so if Acer indeed comes out with a 3D laptop then it'll be the world's second manufacturer to do so. Sharp even got to a second generation of them. Here's a link: http://www.physorg.com/news3296.html. It was so successful you can't buy them anymore. The problem was lack of content and you needed to hold you head in the hot-zone of 3D-ness. Even if Acer manages to release a decent 3D screen, and we start watching the latest 3D movies on it, I think they'll have a tough time overcoming the puppet theater effect on such a small screen. It's not such a problem in a huge cinema, but would be in this case.