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Comments: 249 +-   Sony To Launch 3D TVs By Late 2010 on Thursday September 03, @09:29AM

Posted by timothy on Thursday September 03, @09:29AM
from the some-reclicking-may-be-necessary dept.
displays
tv
games
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."
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  • porn (Score:3, Interesting)

    by BisexualPuppy (914772) on Thursday September 03, @09:30AM (#29299475)
    3D porn, anyone ?
    • This is drearily likely to be the driving force behind the growth of the technology.

      Look at history. Video cassettes, the Internet, silicone rubber formulae...

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        This is drearily likely to be the driving force behind the growth of the technology. Look at history. Video cassettes, the Internet, silicone rubber formulae...

        It would be closer to the truth to say that Disney's support of VHS put a VCR in every home.

      • Re:porn (Score:4, Funny)

        by Shikaku (1129753) on Thursday September 03, @10:25AM (#29300271)

        driving force behind the growth of the technology.

        Freud: "Too easy"

  • Hrmm (Score:3, Interesting)

    by acehole (174372) on Thursday September 03, @09:34AM (#29299523) Homepage

    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 (Score:4, Interesting)

      by eldavojohn (898314) * <my/.username@@@gmail.com> on Thursday September 03, @09:39AM (#29299605) Homepage Journal

      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 [wikipedia.org]. 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?

      • To clarify, one eye is significantly weaker than the other to the point I can't read things if I close my other eye to see out of it. My vision primarily is out of the one eye.

        • Try glasses or contact lenses.

          • Kind of an idiotic thing to say, really. While they do help many, corrective lenses are certainly not a panacea (nor are the surgical options, which for many of us don't even exist). Like many, my vision with corrective lenses is extremely poor in one eye. Looking at "3D" is not only ineffective, it gives me a blinding headache. Probably there are enough people for whom this is true that "3D" display technology based on 2D devices will fail in the marketplace.
            • Probably there are enough people for whom this is true that "3D" display technology based on 2D devices will fail in the marketplace.

              Just as red/green status and traffic lights have failed because of the wide prevalence of red/green colorblindness?

              It's a binocular world out there, and I don't think the rate of anomalous depth perception is high enough to change that.

              • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

                Bad example -- the colors of traffic lights are not the only cue, the position also informs. There will be no widespread adoption of 3D displays until they get holovision working right. Stereo vision != 3D, it's just a simulation (tied to silly looking glasses) and thus it will remain a novelty.
              • Re:Hrmm (Score:5, Interesting)

                by Urban Garlic (447282) on Thursday September 03, @10:29AM (#29300313)

                > 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.

      • Re:Hrmm (Score:5, Funny)

        by Hognoxious (631665) on Thursday September 03, @09:52AM (#29299821) Homepage Journal
        There's different degrees of dominance. He's probably got an extreme case where the other eye is mostly disregarded by the brain, possibly because it's defective. The eye, I mean.
      • Re:Hrmm (Score:4, Informative)

        by mcgrew (92797) * on Thursday September 03, @10:26AM (#29300277) Journal

        My ex-wife has strabismus [wikipedia.org], which is probably what the GP was referring to. She couldn't see 3D either.

    • Everyone has a dominate eye.

    • Projectors? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by goombah99 (560566) on Thursday September 03, @10:03AM (#29299975)

      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? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Snowspinner (627098) * <philsand@NoSPaM.ufl.edu> on Thursday September 03, @11:06AM (#29300737) Homepage

        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? (Score:4, Interesting)

          by TexVex (669445) on Thursday September 03, @11:53AM (#29301295)
          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: (Score:3, Informative)

        3D is an illusion. Your eyes focus on one object, and anything at a different depth will appear in double. Your brain learns that this is depth, and automatically shifts the focus of your eyes to the various depths of objects as you look at them. (The eyes tilt inward – slightly cross-eyed – so both eyes are pointed directly at whatever it is you're looking at. If you're staring at the bridge of your nose, you'll be completely cross-eyed; if you're looking off into the distance, they'll be nearl

  • It's not 3D (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Omnifarious (11933) * on Thursday September 03, @09:39AM (#29299595) Homepage Journal

    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.

    • Actually it can be (Score:5, Interesting)

      by goombah99 (560566) on Thursday September 03, @10:06AM (#29300003)

      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.

    • Re:It's not 3D (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anenome (1250374) on Thursday September 03, @11:32PM (#29307821) Homepage

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

  • Yay! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Quiet_Desperation (858215) on Thursday September 03, @09:40AM (#29299613)
    And, of course, there is a industry-wide, agreed upon standard for the 3D encoding and formats, right? Right??
    • Yes .... Blueray 3D and HD 3D!
      • Re:Yay! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by clone53421 (1310749) on Thursday September 03, @10:35AM (#29300427) Journal

        holographic 3D that you can move around and choose your own perspective.

        Producers would probably hate that. They're trying to perfect the angle of the shot, but only one person can actually see it from that angle because you have to be in the exact middle of the viewing area in order to see it. Plus, any sort of distance shot would be un-viewable from anywhere significantly off-center because the target of the scene would be out of the picture at that angle. They'd have to move it into the foreground, spoiling the distance effect.

  • not sure what dimension you guys are living in but my tv has both width, height, AND depth. Already 3d.

  • by rodrigoandrade (713371) on Thursday September 03, @09:43AM (#29299659)
    > 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.
    • What kind of eyesight problems do you have which prevent you from seeing 3D? My father is missing an eye (accident as kid), so he obviously doesn't see three-d but still can enjoy the movie.

      aside -

      I still have the stereoscope glasses from when I saw Disney's Lost World 3D theatrical movie. Do these things have any monetary value, or should I just toss them?

    • I think that cinemas are realising it. A lot of people have difficulty with 3d for one reason or another. When 3d films first arrived there was no choice. Now often there are showings in 3D and showings without. My wife has a lazy eye and 3d looks as though it has a feint shadow image to her and gives her a headache.
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      Of course they do, but 3d movies [pack people in, so people like you are a tiny demographic.
      If this is l;ike the demo I say, it will be an option built into the screen and firmware, not the only way to look at the screens.

  • ... I'm not much interested in 3D until the glasses ARE the display, to be honest. Should be great if you're doing 3D design though.

  • Glasses? Nah... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Arrawa (681474) on Thursday September 03, @09:49AM (#29299773)
    I refuse sitting in my living room wearing those nasty 3D-glasses. I'll wait untill Philips opens up its WOWvx [wikipedia.org] department again. I've seen this live and my initial reaction was, well, WOW!
  • Hum, where did I put my pedant hat... hum not here, not here... ah there we go. Hum hum

    That's stereoscopic television, not 3d TV. I personally don't enjoy that much stereoscopic images, they don't look really believable to me. Stereoscopy is only one way we build a 3d model of our environment, the parallax created by our recent movements creates an accurate map too. Sure if you lose an eye, you'll have much poorer depth perception, but you won't lose it all. If you cover one eye, the world outside doesn't s

  • by jjeffries (17675) on Thursday September 03, @09:57AM (#29299867)
    The Sony 3D TV will only play back Beta tapes and DRM-ed content off Memory Sticks(TM), and it will install a rootkit on every device in your house before committing seppuku.
  • by RevWaldo (1186281) * on Thursday September 03, @10:10AM (#29300053)
    Will we ever have that trope of nearly every near-future sci-fi story - the true volumetric display [wikipedia.org] 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!
Those who in quarrels interpose, must often wipe a bloody nose.