3D Flat Panel With No Glasses

m4c north writes "From Japan Today: 'Toshiba Corp said Friday it has developed a brand-new flat-display that allows viewers to see three-dimensional images without using special glasses. The display is expected to be applied to arcade games, virtual menus at restaurants and simulations of buildings and landscapes. The company said it aims to commercialize the display within two years.' JCN Network offers a few more details than Japan Today's rather short summary. And Toshiba's [toshiba.co.jp] press release has some simple figures. Maybe pinball will make a comeback!"

COOL!

[Formz (870969)]

Can we view pictures on our 2D monitors?

Re:COOL!

[Haydn Fenton (752330)]

You must be new here; we loves ourself some old news here at SlashDot ;)

3D Display

[kabz (770151)]

I dunno about pinball, but we could have some rocking porn.

Re:3D Display

[DigiShaman (671371)]

3D cocks that shoot back. In your face action. Subsribe now!

Is this new?

[tolan-b (230077)]

I thought there'd been monitors out that do this for a while? Wasn't there a laptop with this tech?

Re:Is this new?

[kabz (770151)]

Yep, this has already been done, http://www.sharpsystems.com/products/pc_notebooks/ actius/rd/3d/ [sharpsystems.com]

More to the point, are there any applications that make sensible use of this ?

Re:Is this new?

[NeoThermic (732100)]

Any that require 3D models to show what is required. CAD/CAM applications, any one doing 3D rendering, showcases for new homes, medical software (teaching that is), etc.

The "average" user won't, however, have any use for this until computer games start using it, but then again, thats the whole reason why we have faster computers now isn't it?

NeoThermic

Re:Is this new?

[mikael (484)]

Yes, there is. But the article is describing a 24" flatbed display system that would sit on your desk or lap and is viewable from all directions within +/-30 degrees from perpendicular and distances over 30 cm. Apparently, the rendering software generates 12 to 16 different stereoscopic images which are combined to generate the different views for each eye. However, the resolution is rather low at 480x300 pixels.

Each pixel has a microlense that only allows light from that pixel to be viewed from a particular direction - it's the natural extension of the laptop screen system.

Sharp?

[kyle90 (827345)]

Isn't Sharp already selling 3D LCD screens?

Yes, and on a notebook with Linux.

[cbreaker (561297)]

You can see it here. [sharpsystems.com]

Funny glasses

[wingsofchai (817999)]

But I liked those red and blue glasses! They made me look cool...

Wow, I can't wait...

[Captain Rotundo (165816)]

Until I have one, so I can keep reading this story but only IN 3-D!

Been done

[keyframe (796422)]

Sharp has had 3D Displays [sharpsystems.com] that don't require glasses for some time now.

Re:I wonder why this wasn't on slashdot

[tricops (635353)]

Except there was a slashdot story about a Sharp laptop with those screens, not that long ago, with Linux pre-installed. I've already forgotten the name of the place doing it though... some other Linux distro...

Re:I wonder why this wasn't on slashdot

[LocoMan (744414)]

Here's the story (at work now and too lazy to make it a link): http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/22/ 042253&tid=189

i've seen some

[mjbkinx (800231)]

Has anyone seen these screens in person?

not these, but i've seen a model from these guys [seereal.com] on a fair in helsinki in late 1999. i always thought it would be nice to have a 3d display that worked without glasses, and all of a sudden i found myself standing right in front of one. it was quite impressive, good image quality and yes, a convincing effect. only when i moved my head it took a very short moment to retrack my eyes and readjust the prisms (there are prisms in front of each vertical pixel row. they direct the light so that one eye sees the even and the other the odd numbered pixel columns). the guy peresenting it told me they had played quake III on it :)
i came across their displays again on cebit a few years later, there also were some by the fraunhofer institute [fraunhofer.de] (the ones i've seen are probably not on the page, they had one or two that tracked your eyes and adjusted to your position, and one that only worked at a specific position, iirc).

anyway, while searching for the seereal link above, i came across this [stereo3d.com] list of 3d displays, there even are price quotes for a few.

Usefulness?

[NightWulf (672561)]

These faux 3D moniters sound nice and all, but I can't really see the big use of it. In specialized ways like the examples stated they sound good, but for games and regular applications it's probably useless. We're not talking holograms here, it's just basically what you see on a cheezy 3D film just without the glasses. I'm more intrested in the day when digital paper is cheap and effective. Imagine layering a room with this, and getting images on all 6 sides, and playign things such as an FPS, or RPG. Even adapting movies and such would be quite useful.

Re:Usefulness?

[drinkypoo (153816)]

having a better sense of depth would be the best thing to ever happen to racing and flying games. immersive 3d would be great, but this is not at all useless.

Game Consoles?

[Shadow Wrought (586631)]

Will the next generation of Game consoles be able to make use of this technology? Seems like the uber-realistic shooter could be nigh.

Not the same as Sharp

[eXzite (839737)]

If you RTFA, it becomes evident that this display technology isn't the same as Sharp's 3D LCD. Sharp's display requires you to be in center of the display, and at a certain distance, and the 3D effect works by projecting steroscopic images at each eye. They direct two different screen images essentially, but it's still the same old trick, just without glasses, instead, a diffusion filter angles the output to each eye.

From this article, it seems as if each pixel is a microlens that redirects the display to your two eyes on a per-lightwave basis. This obviously allows a much wider viewing angle, and for multiple viewers, while still creating the illusion of depth.

New?

[EEBaum (520514)]

Saw one of these at E3 two years ago, though I forget who made it.

Granted, it kinda made my head hurt to look at, but regardless, you could see 3D images on a screen outside the booth.

Re:New?

[Jonny_eh (765306)]

Are you sure you're not think of Sharp's technology? It's quite different than this one. Toshiba's looks far superior, we'll see.

Re:New?

[EEBaum (520514)]

It could be. It was a while ago and E3 has a way of, well, overstimulating me until I forget who made what.

Screenshots?

[RobertKozak (613503)]

Anyone have a link to the screen shots? I really would love to see how good the 3d effect is.

Robert

Vision impairments

[XorNand (517466)]

I have 20/400 vision in my left eye. Because of that, I perceive almost everything with my right eye. As a kid, this made taskes such as hitting a baseball or catching a football exceedingly difficult because I have piss-poor depth perception. It almost made those red & blue "3D" movies pointless for me. Will this mean that I can't read any informational displays that use this type of tech in the future?

Re:Vision impairments

[tricops (635353)]

Another poster suggested moving side to side.... but besides that, it's not like you *have* to use the technology from the screens. Actually, I'm not sure about the details of this particular screen, but I would imagine it would have to be enabled in software before it did anything - a configuration setting for pieces of software which support it. So leave the setting off, I guess, and you're no worse off than you are now...

Re:Vision impairments

[tricops (635353)]

Ah sorry, kinda out of it. A setting wouldn't help there, no... my mistake for missing that part of the post.

Product demo

[dfj225 (587560)]

My company was given a demo of a similar product only from another vendor. It was a pretty interesting demonstration consisting of video and real time 3D animations. The only problem I could see with their implementation was that it had "sweet spots", four if I recall correctly, and unless you were viewing the display from an one of the correct angles it didn't look quite right. One thing that was pretty impressive was that using a custom driver that they made, it would be technically possible to alter a

3D virtual restaurant menus?

[digidave (259925)]

That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. The only restaurant that could afford this would be a very high-end one and they're not going to disrupt their elegant atmosphere with a bunch of 3D LCDs.

Maybe Planet Hollywood would go for this. That way they can show what a $15 hamburger looks like in 3D.

How does this work?

[mcc (14761)]

However, mainstream 3-D technology is limited in terms of the viewing angle at which it can display 3-D images, and the images are also tiring to view.

Toshiba's new displays employ an integral imaging system that reproduces light beams similar of those produced by a real object, not its visual representation.

But that's all they say. How does this work? Are they somehow able to emit light waves going out at every point from a flat surface, so that you see a 3D object with correct perspective no matter which direction you look at it from? I guess that isn't that unrealistic; I mean, mirrors do exactly that. But how does it work?

Is this for real or are they just being overenthusiastic in their own press releases?

Re:How does this work?

[mikael (484)]

How does this work? Are they somehow able to emit light waves going out at every point from a flat surface, so that you see a 3D object with correct perspective no matter which direction you look at it from? I guess that isn't that unrealistic; I mean, mirrors do exactly that. But how does it work?

Take a standard 1600x1200 display, place a microlense over each pixel so that the light is only visible from one of sixteen directions (imagine 16 point distributed over a hemisphere). Now wherever a person stands, each eye will only
see a particular image.

Middleware software is used to convert existing images to work with this system. A 3D application would have to render 12-16 different views of the scene for this to work.

Re:How does this work?

[bill_mcgonigle (4333)]

Even people with normal stereoscopic vision can have problems with this.

I took a helicopter up to a glacier in Alaska once. It's so vast and has so little foreground that you can't judge distance.

I asked the tour guide, since we had an hour up there if I could walk the quarter mile or so over to a waterfall that was several hundred feet high.

He explained to me that it was five miles away and a quarter mile high. There was absolutely no way for me to judge the distance properly so my brain basically mad

Popup ads

[MiKM (752717)]

This will pop-up ads to a whole new dimension.

Re:Popup ads

[hazee (728152)]

Yeah, if you think popup ads are annoying now, just wait another 10 years until we have the technology whereby they leap out of the screen and slap you around the face with a dead haddock.

Man will that piss people off.

Pinball Blues

[mrshowtime (562809)]

Well, there already was a company that up until last year was making vitual pinball machine games with a large flat panel monitor mounted vertically. It failed and now the company has retrofitted the machines to play other games. The only way pinball would work, outside a real pinball machine, is to have spot on physics and force feedback to match and to be almost holographic. Pinball is a visceral experience, you hit the ball and it goes where you hit it. No computers to cheat you of that.

Regret

[by Anonymous Coward]

There will come a day when you witness a 3D goatse, and then you will surely regret this.

Let me guess...

[dmccarty (152630)]

From the it's-been-just-two-years-away-for-the-last-10-year s dept.

nasty

[zippthorne (748122)]

10 or more views?? it's going to look like those lenticular "3D" playing cards.. you know the ones.. where the wrong angle results in you seeing a combo of more than the recommended number of frames.

How about a Sony Playstation 3D?

[DumbSwede (521261)]

Practical 3D-display technology has been just around the corner for years. Trouble is it always falls short with tradeoffs in brightness, resolution, or head placement. When going to a 3D movie shown with polarized glasses or LCD shutter glasses you still have to keep your head perfectly level or the image will split diagonally in two.

This will probably be much the same, another attempt that falls just short. I predict 3D will take off big time when very small, very light weight, very high resolution headsets arrive, whether LCD or scanning micro-laser or whatever.

Despite my pessimism I think we should plan for a 3D future now. I doubt the HD-DVD people or Blu-Ray camp will see this post, but they should build in 3D compliance now. Since digital compression is about encoding similarities between frames, it should work well to compress two nearly identical images to one probably only adding a 10 percent overhead for a film shot in 3D. All players should be able to read a 3D title, ignoring the 3D enhancement data on standard players. Blu-Ray especially would have both the capacity and bandwidth to pull this off, in fact imagine the Marketing coo a Playstation 3D would be. I'll bet you wouldn't have to change most off the shelf 3D games to be true 3D in true stereovision if the hardware is done right. Existing titles transformed to a more immersive experience overnight.

Re:How about a Sony Playstation 3D?

[master_p (608214)]

3D for games is the next killer entertainment application. Unfortunately, it is difficult to achieve.

But here is an idea: instead of doing 3d on a 2d surface, why don't we have 3d pixel cubes? a true 3d display would be a cube that contains little 3d boxes arranged in 3 dimensions. Each box could contain some sort of substance that, when electricity is applied to it, becomes opaque with a colour; otherwise, it is blank and transparent. Electric lines will be thin and therefore nearly invisible.

The 3d cube

This is new?!?!?

[3vi1 (544505)]

Hello, the Sega game I played in 1992 called and wants it's technology [klov.com] back.

Re:This is new?!?!?

[3vi1 (544505)]

BTW, I am very depressed that nothing as visually impressive as Time Traveler [klov.com] has been released in the last 10 years. The thing looked 3D from like 170 degrees. I actually had to stick my hand out to see if it would go through the holograms.

When I first saw this game, I thought that technology was taking a great leap and that the near future held great things... I can't believe that there hasn't been any mainstream use since then. :(

Just bring back old-tech 3D...

[Stormwatch (703920)]

Remember the flickering 3D glasses for Sega's old Master System? They were pretty good. It'd be great if a modern game console had something like that.

Re:Just bring back old-tech 3D...

[RichardX (457979)]

You can get them for the PC. I've got a pair of EDimensional ones.. They work wonders on GTA:VC

This looks like old technology to me

[Kainaw (676073)]

This looks very much like the old (1993) David Beavers' "Magic Stage" - a 3D projection of a real-time computer generated image using laser pointers. Light is light, regardless of the source. In the Beavers' project, he was not limited to a few inches above the projection platform and he integrated it with "Poser" so the 3D images could be manipulated by actors. Last I heard, his project was taken in my David Copperfield and nobody else really uses it. Kind of sad because it looked very interesting when

How it works

[m00j (801234)]

You just have to wink each eye in rapid succession to get the 3d effect, the panel is a regular one! They have quite clearly patented the idea of winking rapidly.

3D overrated, panning a better bargain

[Tablizer (95088)]

A 3D-like sensation can be acheived using panning around the scenery. This is probably far cheaper and far easier on the eyes for extended play. The brain uses motion parallax to estimate distances. It provides just about the same info as stereo vision, just not quite as fast. Thus, you get 80% of the effect/sensation with 20% of the cost and eye-strain.

(Google "Mars Pathfinder Stereo Wiggle")

Lensing Is Awful

[Effugas (2378)]

You would have a hard time finding someone who wants autostereoscopy to look good than me. I've bought three different sets of LCD shutter glasses, installed and tweaked ungodly numbers of drivers, and partially went to SIGGRAPH simply to see the state of the art in the technology.

As of September, 2004, it's all awful. I've seen the Sharp Laptop. I've seen the X3D display. I've seen every attempt to create 3D without glasses, and they're all embarassingly bad. One inch of depth does not 3D make, especially not at the cost of visually hideous artifacts (half the horizontal resolution means you end up looking at these double width, very blocky pixels). There was one exception, which used several stacked layers to simulate 3D without attempting to use lensing. The depth was still awful but it didn't hurt at all to look at. Of course, you'd never notice any depth from a distance.

Of course, it's not just lensing that's problematic. I got strapped into not one but two HMD-based systems -- one, a swimming simulator [doxpara.com], the other a fairly cool cockpit simulation with per-finger force feedback gloves. Both systems looked cool from the outside, but having played with this stuff off and on since the days of Amiga-based Arcade VR (what *was* the name of that system?) I can tell you it hasn't gotten much better. I wanted it to be immersive, but...no.

Really, the only display tech that really blew me away used dual rear projectors that fed back into one another to achieve alignment, then emitted polarized light onto a single screen. With very light and simple glasses, the effect was utterly seamless.

I vaguely remember the spinning display approach also worked.

--Dan

Re:Lensing Is Awful

[cr0sh (43134)]

since the days of Amiga-based Arcade VR (what *was* the name of that system?)

The name of the original system was "Virtuality", at the time the company was named "W Industries, Ltd" and based in the UK. The original system used an Amiga 3000 with custom video graphics cards (one for each eye) and IIRC, a SCSI CD-ROM drive. The HMD used small (1 inch or so diagonal) color CRTs, which were optically folded into the eyes (periscope style). The tracking was done via a Polhemus mag tracking system.

These early ma

Re:Accompanied

[bcmm (768152)]

A true 3D windows manager would be cool. Ever used a WM where unfocused windows fade to transparent? Imagine if they moved into the background.

And imagine that bar in OS X, coming towards you as well as magnifying...