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3D LCD Screen without Glasses
Nomikos writes "
12" LCD screen giving a 3D view - no glasses needed. "Designs
created, float between the screen and the user."
They don't give any specs, only mention a head/body tracker (clip-on emitter, screen receiver) which makes it only a tiny bit plausible IMO.
Anyone know of a technology which'd make this possible? "
Anyone know of a technology which'd make this possible? "
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/ Research/Rainbow/projects/asd.html
Research project in the Computer Lab and Dept. of Engineering.
Hi,
I saw a prototype of a device like this at a stand at this year's Cebit. The stand was from some German university, I forgot which one unfortunately. The demonstration display was limited to 640x480 pixels and it was also about 12 inches in size. Two eyetrackers at the top of the display note the position of your eyes. The display's columns have two sides that are at an angle, these are rotated so that both eyes see a different side of the column.
I was underwhelmed by the effect at first when the demonstrator was just showing rotating cubes and other geometric shapes but later he put on a simple 3d landscape built out of some iso-lines (not solid) and there the effect of zooming in and out and circling around was quite impressive.
One disadvantage is of course that only one person can use it at any one time.
Michiel Denie!
There was an article posted here on Slashdot a month or two ago about doing it. Its probably using the same technology. (Ie, a holographic lens over an LCD screen to divert segments of the image to each eye) Alternately they might be doing it the old fashioned way, having a plastic lens over the screen like you'd see on those 3-D baseball cards.
I'd guess its the former. Using head tracking you could shift position of the holographic lens to keep the images meeting the proper eyes as the position of the head changes. Having experimented with those plastic lenses over monitors before, that's definately an issue -- you'll get the correct image at certain "sweet spots", but they alternate with areas where the image gets reversed. Looking at it in one of those spots gives me a headache.
I believe this was on slashdot alittle while ago... The technique involves using two lcd screens (one on tope of the other) and alternating scan lines on each (i believe). originally you needed to keep your head in the correct possition to make the effect work... it seems that they've just added a head tracker to allow users to move their head.
This thread has it right. The technology is new, and newly patented, and dirt cheap. It uses fixed hologriphic lenses on normal LCD screens, and is supposed to look VERY good.
There was an article about this in EETimes about 2 months ago (I saw it in the paper version, so unless I can address my recycle bin there is no URL available)
The only limitation now is that it halves your resolution. To get an 800 x 600 display, you would need an actual LCD resolution of 1600 x 600. (but that is an easy problem to solve). This will make for some very good games, and will meet the price point.
The original developers (the holographic artists mentioned in this thread) are poor now, but I believe are currently negiotation rights to their patent for millions of dollars. They probably do not have credit card processing information on their site because they are not particularly interested in selling to jane consumer, they are negiotiating with the big guns for the big money. They can knock out prototypes pretty cheaply now, but they are not interested in large scale production.
All this is from memory of an article I read over lunch two months ago, so take it all with a grain of salt.
Bill
Mathematically impossible requirements are technically not against policy.
Here is the old story from Slashdot. This article happens to be on a completely different product. As some other people already mentioned there is no information about how it works exactly. The previous article actually had some stuff about how it worked.
Well, if anybody finds that useful...
License managers are the bane of my existence
This may just be a shot in the dark, but here's how I imagine that it works:
... ...
You build the screen so there are two pictures interleaved pixel by pixel, and physically, only one of the two pixels is visible to each eye. That way your eyes see different pictures at what appears to be the same place, thus giving the illusion of 3D.
The grid might look like this:
R00 L00 R01 L01
R10 L10 R11 L11
.
.
.
Where R and L refer to right and left eye images. Then you have to construct the screen such that from the angle of the right eye, only the R pixels are viewable, and from the angle of the left eye, only the L pixels can be seen (simple optical filters can do this).
The screen has to track your head because you have to face the screen directly for it to work.
Any other ideas?
The EE Times article is here.
At Live'96 (!), a consumer electronics show in the UK, I saw something similar from Sharp, IIRC.
The 3D effect was only viewable from a few defined angles, and to check you were in the right position there was a green LED on top of the screen which could only be seen when the angle was right.
I *think* that a polarising filter was used to display a different image for each eye. It worked, but of course if you moved your head the 3D effect disappeared...
If this uses tracking, perhaps it changes the polarisation angles dynamically, or is that just wibble?
It was a few months ago, may have even been here (on slashdot). The monitor has little polarized 'fins' much like modern trafic lights or 'walk/dont walk' signs; each eye can only see the image from the 'fins' polarized for it so each eye sees a different image and you've got 3d. It also seemed the process for creating these was afordable and the technology works with LCD screens.
Slashdot, would a spell-checker for posting be too much to ask? It's not rocket science!
The tracking device looks like a slightly modified RingMouse (now called the Owl by some resellers, I think.) It uses ultrasound time of flight, emitted from the tracker and received by three speakers, to track 3D position, and an infrared receiver for button clicks.
I sincerely doubt that the tracking is being used to adjust the lens (be it holographic or lenticular, I don't know.) Even with a perfect lens, you want to track the position and orientation of the head so that you can adjust the 3D rendering view accordingly. Without the headtracking, the image of the object will distort as you move away from the sweet spot, i.e., the point in real space that corresponds to the virtual view point. With the head tracking, the object appears to remain still, and you can move back and forth to get parallax, look at the sides, etc. With a full 6DOF tracker, you can even tilt your head and the view remains perfect. With the tracker used here, you will not be able to do that.