Sony To Launch 3D TVs By Late 2010

eldavojohn writes "The Financial Times is reporting that Sony is announcing 3D TVs for late 2010 at the IFA technology trade show in Berlin. It's another glasses-based technology with "active shutter" being employed (the same stuff teased at CES as well as employed on NVIDIA's glasses). Expect to see 3D Bravia television sets, Vaio laptops, PS3s and Blu-ray disc players compatible with this technology."

Comments

porn

[BisexualPuppy]

3D porn, anyone ?

Hrmm

[acehole]

I saw a couple of 3D tvs shown at a tradeshow I went to about a month ago. There were two different types, one I looked at closely had a different type of glass on the front which made the image behind 3D. The other by sony didnt have it as far as I could see and looked just like a normal TV.

Sucks to be me though, I've got a dominate eye so I can't see the 3D stuff. Just looks like an out of tune tv. Guess i've got that to look forward to when they go mainstream :P

Re:Hrmm

[eldavojohn]

Sucks to be me though, I've got a dominate eye so I can't see the 3D stuff. Just looks like an out of tune tv. Guess i've got that to look forward to when they go mainstream :P

Um, almost all of the population has a "dominant eye" with a very small fraction having no ocular dominance at all. I haven't had the chance to demo any of these technologies but if you're asserting that ocular dominance renders them useless then I think Sony's market is drastically small. I'm not an optometrist but are you saying you experience ocular dominance far more than the average person? To a debilitating extent?

Re:Hrmm

[Urban Garlic]

> It's a binocular world out there...

It really isn't. Binocular stereopsis is not the most important depth cue that human vision uses, it's just a fairly compelling one that's easy to produce mechanically. Real-world vision uses a combination of relative size, parallax and relative motion, illumination, focus, and binocular cues to figure out depth information. There are one-eyed folks out there with excellent depth perception, and two-eyed folks with poor depth perception. Almost all of the depth action is visual-cortex post-processing.

One of the causes of eyestrain from typical binocular 3D systems is that the images mix up the binocular and focal cues -- the binocular info says that the stuff is a few meters in front of you, but the focal cue says it's all in the same plane.

I personally seem to be sensitive to the focal cue, for some reason -- I seem to get full-on migraines from ViewMaster[tm]-style binocular 3D viewers, and noticeable eyestrain from desktop-scale 3D systems, but can watch theatrical 3D movies comfortably, which I think is due to the differing screen sizes and distances.

Have they wondered...

[rodrigoandrade]

> It's another glasses-based technology with "active shutter" being employed.

Great, but I wonder if these companies ever think about people with eyesight problems (yes, talking about myself) who can't properly eperience glass-based 3D movies.

Glasses? Nah...

[Arrawa]

I refuse sitting in my living room wearing those nasty 3D-glasses. I'll wait untill Philips opens up its WOWvx department again. I've seen this live and my initial reaction was, well, WOW!

Projectors?

[goombah99]

What I don't understand is why we are not seeing cheap 3d for projectors using polarized glasses. It would take less than $20 worth of parts to take a standard projector and make it a 3d projector. Just replace the spinning color wheel on the projector with one that has the same colors twice with different polarizers on each side.

This cheapo solution of course lowers the luminance and requires either a slower color wheel or twice the frame rate on the DLP. for a little more money you could even recapture the lost luminance, but it would be simpler to use a brighter bulb. Neither of those are serious issues because projector luminance has more than doubled for the same price in the last few years, and so have color wheel speeds, so it's a tiny degredadation to use 3-d mode. Moreover it's demostrably tolerable to viewers since there are people who sell retrofits for projectors (that go over the front of the lens) that do exactly that. But the retrofit approach is expensive compared to just changing out the color wheel.

The question then is how do you drive it but that's all a software issue.

Re:Projectors?

[Snowspinner]

Because you need a screen that will reflect the light back in a polarized fashion. In film terms, you're talking about a screen with silver crystals in it for reflectivity. But those screens are enormously fragile - which is part of why 3-D keeps flopping over in theaters - if one person throws their drink at the screen, or even touches it, the screen is wrecked for good and needs to be replaced.

That's not technology suitable for home usage. Which is why home systems have always been based on field sequential systems of 3-D.

Re:Projectors?

[TexVex]

I personally can't stand shutter glasses. My vision is very sensitive to flicker. It's not a matter of refresh rate but one of how much time is spent in blackness between frames; 3D necessitates a relatively long blanking of each eye.

Theater screens using circular polarization work extremely well. The glasses are super cheap and do not require electronics. Without needing to black out the image to each eye for half of each frame, my personal flicker issues are avoided. The circular polarization allows the viewer to tilt his head off horizontal and not mess up the 3D effect. It seems to me that circular polarization is a clear winner over shutter glasses. What is the potential of circularly polarized 3D LCD displays?

Also, what about DLP? I have great love for my DLP TV, and would be very much interested in a 3D DLP display. Does the screen screw up polarization there as well, and would one that could preserve the polarization suffer from the fragility you speak of?

Re:Projectors?

[Anonymous Coward]

Simply replacing the color wheel is not the only change. You will also need to double the refresh rate of the LCD in the projector to provide the normal 60Hz for each eye. This is very expensive, and the main reason what you suggest is not done. To properly do 3D on a CRT monitor, you need one that can handle 120Hz refresh rate, which is much higher than what most consumer devices can handle. Some LCDs can do this, but certainly not all.

Actually it can be

[goombah99]

Unless I can move my head to look around something, it's not 3D. If they want to call it 'stereo' TV, that's fine, but it's not 3D.

Well even a hologram goes away when you move past the film. What you mean is you want the image to change depending on your position in the room up to a point (where you are behind the hologram).

And indeed some TVs can do this. the ones with linticular lenses in principle can offer different views to different parts of the room. the stero headsets however don't.

True Volumetric Displays

[RevWaldo]

Will we ever have that trope of nearly every near-future sci-fi story - the true volumetric display with an image that appears in midair like a living statue made out light, no eyeglasses, panes of glass, contact lenses, volatile gases, or brain implants required? Is there anything in the labs today that make this a true definitely-maybe-keep-your-hopes-up-sure-to-have-it-twenty-years-from-now technology, like fusion reactors?

Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope!

Re:details that were omitted

[mnky-33]

Actually Sony is one of the few companies which have changed their ways. Most of their tech is fairly open and compatible, they've got better since the rootkit fiasco.

Re:It's not 3D

[Anenome]

What you want is Johnny Lee-style head-tracking. Watch this and be amazed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw