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More 3D Displays to Come

Posted by michael on Sun Jun 13, 2004 01:10 PM
from the invest-in-dramamine dept.
Displays
Anonymous Writer writes "The first laptop using an autostereo display to show images in 3D without special glasses was the Sharp Mebius PC-RD3D in Japan, later released in the US as the Sharp Actius RD3D. NEC has a line of computers with autostereo displays as well. They are the NEC Valuestar T VT900/8D desktop, the LaVie S LS900/9E laptop, and LaVie RX LR700/8E laptop. The line uses NEC's SoundVu technology that uses the display as a speaker! Autostereo displays are becoming more popular according to Martyn Williams and Tom Krazit from the IDG News Service. In their article in PC World, they claim laptops are just the start of it. A new satellite service by Mobile Broadcasting will be broadcasting 3D content to handheld devices in Japan some time soon. Another player in this market is Dynamic Digital Depth (mentioned in a previous post of mine), whose content services convert 2D video to 3D for display in this medium. Sanyo may be releasing 50-inch Plasma Displays that can display 3D. MIT's Media Laboratory is developing a more advanced 3D display, calling it a full resolution autostereoscopic display, that would allow a viewer to walk around and not lose the 3D effect, which current autostereo displays can't do."
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More 3D Displays to Come 50 Comments More /

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  • Tux would like to know... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    if the 3d display makes him look fat

  • 3D RasMol? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by clustercrasher (675663) on Sunday June 13 2004, @01:17PM (#9414259)
    Anyone planning to hook this into RasMol or PyMol? I would love to be able to look at my protein structures in 3D.

    http://pymol.sourceforge.net/

    • Re:3D RasMol? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Writer (746272) on Sunday June 13 2004, @03:34PM (#9415034)
      Check this [actuality-systems.com] out if you want a 3D display for protein structures.

    • Re:3D RasMol? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The drivers for nVidia cards have built-in stereo 3d support for anaglyph (red/blue) and page flip modes. I've herd if you turn the drivers onto page flip mode they work with these fancy new 3d monitors, basically flipping from left to right eye images with every other frame. This is why alot of the laptops coming with these fancy monitors include an nvidia card, as ATI has absolutely no stereographic 3d support.

      The nvidia 3d drivers work fine with most all 3d (opengl or directx) games and applications. I'
    • ICM [molsoft.com] has built in support for a 3d solution using special glasses and special software to interlace the image, its pretty cool. Beyond that though, ICM has to be the least appreciated and most full featured molecular biology software package out there, and the viewer (ICM-Lite) is free to download.

  • Are there any brick and mortar stores (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Throtex (708974) on Sunday June 13 2004, @01:19PM (#9414263)
    ... that carry these 3D display laptops? I'd like to actually see the damned things before I buy one, you know!

    And wow, 1.3 hours of battery life. Looks like I'd need to get a really long extension cord to retain portability. :)

  • 3D Displays (Score:5, Interesting)

    by AnomalyConcept (656699) on Sunday June 13 2004, @01:20PM (#9414265)
    This would be extremely useful, especially in the CAD community. While I only know a little about the area of CAD and manufacturing, this combined with the inkjet plastics printing (I forget the term for it) or rapid prototyping machines would be really neat. Imagine designing something, and being able to view it in 3D from all angles (instead of a render), and then sending it to be printed off. I've never seen one of these 3D displays before; how are the objects rendered? How much processing power is needed to create such a display, especially from a 3D model? I'm sure it needs to be rendered first, but what about a flat-shading 3D program like Autodesk Inventor? 3D displays would be neat for new GUIs. Instead of having a flat 3D desktop, you could have a true 3D desktop. That would be interesting to see...
    • The rendering is probably not at all different from your current '3d goggles' type rendering which basicly any video card on the market can do. It renders two frames, one intended for each, and somehow informs the goggles which one to show to which eye. The problem often is the reduced refresh rate, since you're now drawing 2 distinct pictures (one for each eye) on a single display device.

    • Re:3D Displays (Score:5, Interesting)

      by NanoGator (522640) on Sunday June 13 2004, @03:37PM (#9415067) Homepage Journal
      "This would be extremely useful, especially in the CAD community. While I only know a little about the area of CAD and manufacturing, this combined with the inkjet plastics printing (I forget the term for it) or rapid prototyping machines would be really neat. Imagine designing something, and being able to view it in 3D from all angles (instead of a render), and then sending it to be printed off."

      Figured since I'm a 3D artist, you wouldn't mind if I chimed in. Would a stereoscopic display help me? If the display is convincing enough, yes! Right now, while I'm modelling, I'm constantly rotating the model around, sometimes just slightly, just to get a sense of the parallax. This gives me a clue as to what vertices are where. A stereo display could potentially relieve me from needing to rotate it as much. If that's true, I could get more detail on the screen without worrying about the vid card not being powerful enough for what I'm doing.

      I wish I could tell you for a fact that it would or wouldn't work, but I've yet to experience stereoscopic work-flow. I am rather curious, though.

  • NXT, not NEC (Score:5, Informative)

    by Boneburner (697565) on Sunday June 13 2004, @01:28PM (#9414312)
    I don't want to be an smartass... but the SoundVu technology is not property of NEC, it was developed by NXT... just a word...

  • 3D autostereoscopic displays from MIT (Score:4, Interesting)

    by cgenman (325138) on Sunday June 13 2004, @01:35PM (#9414349) Homepage
    I'm trying to wrap my mind around what exactly that convoluted mess of an MIT press release [mit.edu] is trying to say. If I understand correctly, and someone please correct me if I'm wrong, the system tracks the heads of the people surrounding the display, then projects left-eye right-eye information through an adjustable polarized filter and lense system so that the viewable angle only includes the intended eye. The reason they need such a high refresh-rate is because they want a system that would work with 4 people... 4 people = 8 eyes = 8 times the updates.

    In essence, that's very cool. Why couldn't they just say that?

  • This doesn't work with Linux? From what I read, they are assuming I run Windows ;)
    • "This doesn't work with Linux? From what I read, they are assuming I run Windows ;)"

      That's the great thing about Linux! You can write all the software to make the stereo display work yourself!!! Make sure to release it so we can all have it too. :)
  • I am in the market for a monitor(well, actually a TV/Monitor combo) so I headed on over to Sanyo's site. any company that makes a Hello Kitty toaster [sanyo.com] has to be an awesome company. I would order one cept I don't have $40 to burn :(
    • Hey, I got one. Sad part is I live in germany. And now I will have to completely rebuild the toaster to make it work with germanies 220V grid. But at least a friend of mine had an idea. We'll just stick a diode inside the beast and put a schuko connector [stage3concepts.com] on it. That's as dirty a hack as it gets but in theory it should work. I just HAD to have it... ;-)

  • Small viewing angle (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Saeger (456549) <farrellj&gmail,com> on Sunday June 13 2004, @01:52PM (#9414450) Homepage
    I imagine that the effective viewing angle on these planar 3D displays is very restrictive; move a couple inches to either side and all you'll end up seeing is the half-resolution image meant for one eye.

    The "3D displays to come" that hold the most promise, however, will require that you wear (non-dorky) viewing glasses. These normal looking glasses will use a safe Retinal Scanning [mvis.com] laser to directly overlay 3D imagery onto your field of view. Of course, we won't see this tech in BestBuy until the Law of Accelerating Returns [kurzweilai.net] has run the course of a few more years.

    It's not too hard to think of several killer apps for augmented vision that make all other conventional displays pale in comparison. Even a wall-sized OLED display would take 2nd.

    --

    • Actually, the LCD versions have several viewing angles... move an inch to the side and you're out of phase, move another inch and you're back in phase. It's not perfect, but it works.

      Still, the reason that 3D displays are not currently popular is simply that people won't wear glasses. The SEGA Mastersystem had an excellent 3D effect from a simple pair of shuttered glasses. These are cheap and affordable, the type Kasperov used in his last (completely gimmocky) match against a computer. The 3D effect th

  • Does anything actaully use this? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by bcmm (768152) on Sunday June 13 2004, @01:52PM (#9414452)
    Does/will any software actaully use this?

    It would be very cool for CAD, but this is going to take up to much processor for real-time gaming rendering, isn't it?
    • Didn't you see the "Sun Java Desktop" demos? Imagine, not only can you flip windows so you can see their blank grey undersides, you will be able to see this blank grayness in 3 dimensions!

      More seriously, Sun does seem to think that a 3D desktop will be useful. I doubt it but then, one would need some hands-on with the implementation to judge.

    • Re:Does anything actaully use this? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by jackbird (721605) on Sunday June 13 2004, @02:20PM (#9414577)
      CAD usually end up hitting system resources much harder than games, since games are designed to only render datasets that will provide acceptable performance on the target hardware, while CAD programs, by their very nature, can attempt to render models of arbitrary complexity. Furthermore, with an arbitrary CAD model, you can't get performance boosts from precalculated optimizations like BSP trees.

      Also, speaking as someone who spends much of the workday turning 2D CAD files into 3D models, I don't think a 3D display would really be that useful in CAD, except maybe for client presentations. For starters, leveraging a 3D display to full usefulness would require a good 3D input device, and those just haven't arrived.

      Furthermore, given the limited number of scanlines, It would seem you'd be restricted to a fairly low number of pixels (depth-xels?) of Z resolution, which could quickly become a problem with fine detail.

    • The Sharp Actius RD3D can be used with games [com.com]. It comes bundled with James Bond 007: Nightfire, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2003, and Need for Speed Hot Pursuit 2.

      As for other uses, Dynamic Digital Depth [ddd.com] has photo viewer, movie player, molecular viewer, and PowerPoint plugin that are bundled [ddd.com] with the Actius RD3D as well. They can also be used with other autostereo displays.

  • Reminds me of Looking Glass (Score:3, Interesting)

    by XyborX (632875) <xyborx@xyb o r x .dk> on Sunday June 13 2004, @01:57PM (#9414468) Homepage
    Wow.. Imagine this combined with Suns Project Looking Glass [sun.com]..

    1. Perfect the technology
    2. Lower the cost so consumers can afford it
    3. "My laptop is more awesome than yours!"
    4. Profit!
  • I've been wondering, how long until we have digital cameras that have dual element ccd's

    digital sterescopic imagery... for said laptops...

    I'd love to take some 3-d pictures of my son for example.. esp if I could rotate the shots a few degrees....

    • Build your own rig (Score:4, Interesting)

      by MacFury (659201) <me&johnkramlich,com> on Sunday June 13 2004, @02:17PM (#9414562) Homepage
      Two of my friends have Canon Digital Rebels. We built a small rig using wood and machine screws that allows us to position the cameras side by side, lenses pointing slightly inward.

      It gives us some pretty cool stereo graphic images. The only way I've found to get a true color 3D image is to put both images side by side, then look at their center cross eyed. Is there a better way?

      • You could put both pictures in an animated gif like shown here:
        http://www.well.com/user/jimg/stereo/stereo _hearth .html

        I believe there are some stereoscopic glasses you can use to view the two images as one 3D picture.
        • Or, do what the old-school stereoscopes (i think) did. basically, place a thin piece of cardboard perpendicular to the photos, and let it rest between your eyes, touching your nose. Now, since each eye only sees the intended image, it'll look somewhat 3-d, though you'll have to play with the distance to get it right.
      • You can build or buy a stereoscope. See this link [stereoviews.com] for some sample antique stereoscopes. The concept is that you have a card that is about 10 inches from your eyes. On the card is the two pictures, one for each eye. Then the stereoscope separates your vision so that each eye sees a different image. This is the 19th century version of the Viewmaster [fisher-price.com].

        The antiques might work well if you print your images side-by-side.

    • Canon was going to produce a 3D lens [tvcameramen.com] for their XL1 DV cam, but they canned the idea.

  • Without autostereo? (Score:3, Funny)

    by mikael (484) on Sunday June 13 2004, @02:00PM (#9414493)
    The first laptop using an autostereo display to show images in 3D without special glasses was the Sharp Mebius PC-RD3D in Japan, later released in the US as the Sharp Actius RD3D

    Is the version without this feature, the Sharp Actius R2D2?
  • ...I am very encouraged with the new LCD autostereo displays.

    3D photo imaging never seems to become mainstream, and not having to wear viewing glasses may help its acceptance, at least in some areas (visualization, gaming).

    And there's nothing like the natural appearance of a good 3D Photo.

  • SeeReal and other stereo monitor companies (Score:3, Informative)

    by maddugan (549314) on Sunday June 13 2004, @03:51PM (#9415149) Homepage Journal
    SeeReal [seereal.com] and other stereo monitor manufactures use a similar technique as the Sharp laptop, but the go one step further and track the viewers position and shift the internal LCD to face the viewer. This improves the small view angle, but make the monitor thicker and wider to accommodate the clearance required for the shifting.
  • There are a number of us out there (yes me...), I think around 1-3%, who have effectively no 3D (stereoscopic) vision. In my case, I can detect a profound shift from eye to eye. When I tested on the fancy opthomalogical(sp?) machine where you try to line up 4 lines into a + sign (roughly), I could only ever see two at a time, which two depending on which eye I 'looked' through. In university geology courses, I could never use a stereoscope to examine stereoscopic pictures (trying to estimate a slide-mass was really fun....).

    So, I wonder which, if any, of these 3D technologies will work for people with these kinds of problems? Or, will we just become another group of 'informationally handicapped' people? (Which would suck, since I'm a programmer!)

      • I'm sort of an expert, in that I have had dual mono-scopic vision for almost 40 years now.

        People without stereoscopic vision who are that way because of large deviations in the angle at which their eyes point will get no 3-D from any form of 3D technology.

        Why, well I have 6 degree vertical separation between my eyes, so when both my eyes are open simultaneously my brain has to ignore one of the images to cope.

        So it will continue to ignore one of the stereo images even if produced artificially.
  • Wake me up when they invent the holodeck!

    (Of course, by then there'll be some new *AA trying to crack down on 'illegal 3-D celebrity body scans' to take all the fun out of it...)

  • Well it's cool that AutoStereoScopic displays are here now. When can I bury my head in an ASS?

  • RD3D? (Score:4, Funny)

    by ozbird (127571) on Sunday June 13 2004, @08:31PM (#9416598)
    I'm not sure about that model, but here's a picture [kozmiclazershow.com] of the R3D3 display in action.

  • That's pretty sad. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by blair1q (305137) on Sunday June 13 2004, @08:58PM (#9416701) Journal
    When the MIT Media Lab puts up a webpage about a display, and it's all text, you know there's some suck built right in.

  • stereo + haptics (Score:3, Interesting)

    by rexguo (555504) on Sunday June 13 2004, @09:25PM (#9416793) Homepage

    That is great and all, but I believe the problem with all that, is that you -still- can't intereact with the 3D object you're seeing, at the place where it -appears-. That is, you're seeing the object in front of you, but your hand is like 30cm away on the mouse (or whatever 3D input device) trying to manipulate it. That's one thing we solved at ReachIn [reachin.se] (a company where I used to work for) by projecting the stereo image onto a mirror, and have a 3-DOF force-feedback device installed under the mirror, so that the hand can be -at the same place as the object-!

    • Re:I'm so excited! (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 13 2004, @01:14PM (#9414239)
      If only the images could be made solid and warm to the touch!

    • Re:I'm so excited! (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I know that 3D pr0n is on the way using dual dv cams and dual webcams.

      Realtime-3d.com [realtime-3d.com] makes the driver for the stereo multiplexing. They are even building 3d models in realtime so you could shift your viewing angle without moving the cameras.

      In terms of autostereo displays, I've used a couple and they are very restrictive. DTI makes one for about $1300. You can't move much though.

      For my money, I'm waiting for OLED displays. They'll have faster refresh rates than CRTs (supposedly) so they'll be abl

    • Sharp Actius (Score:5, Informative)

      by Throtex (708974) on Sunday June 13 2004, @02:02PM (#9414501)
      If you click on the Sharp Actius RD3D link and then click "Where to Buy", they show you the direct-from-the-manufacturer cost and allow you to purchase it.

      If it's worth it, I'd buy it. It's running at $2,999.00 at this moment. Can't really tell if it's worth it by looking at a picture of it over the Internet, though.
    • "..was that in that hefty 30 line writeup, nowhere is the cost of all of this stuff mentioned. I bet it's still all out of my price range. :-("

      This is typical of new technology. Comes out expensive, gets popular, then gets relatively cheap. Early adopters that pay lots of $$$ for the new stuff help pay for the R&D that goes into it. Don't be discouraged, rather just expect to wait another year or two.

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