No Glasses Needed For TI's New 3D Display

adeelarshad82 writes "At the MWC, TI showed off a tablet-sized device with a 3D display that doesn't require glasses, running on an existing TI OMAP3 chipset. The 3D demo showed images and video in 3D by using a standard 120-Hz LCD with a special overlay film from 3M that can direct images either towards your left or right eye. By flickering two images very quickly, running at 60 frames per second rather than the usual 30, the display transmits a different picture to each eye, creating a simulated 3D image. The 3D picture can be created using a handheld with dual 3-megapixel cameras and an 800-MHz TI OMAP 3630 chipset."

A: Crap. Lenticular 3D.

[Animaether]

The viewing angle isn't 5 degrees, though.. it's a good bit larger than that.

The major problem is that the overlay (lenticular lenses) don't direct individual images -to your eyes- - such systems would be vastly more expensive and have whole other issues - they simply direct underlying pixels into different directions. If your left eye happens to be in the area where the left image is being directed, and your right eye in the area where the right image is being directed.. congratulations!
Now move your head an inch to the left/right. Now your right eye is seeing the left image and your left eye is seeing the right image. ouch.
Try half an inch.. each eye gets a portion of both images. ungh.
In other words.. there's sweet spots to sit in, and if you don't sit in one of those sweet spots, you're going to get conflicting sensory input.

So 1 user at a time isn't strictly true - if the person next to you sits in one of the other sweet spots, they'll be fine as well.

Half your resolution lost, however (they have to either alternate rows or columns.. 1920x1080 becoming 1920x540 or 960x1080). The human visual system can fill in the blanks from the other eye's perception, but that's just literally plugging holes.

There's far more disadvantages, including 2D quality (another display handles that partially by activating a liquid much like an LCD liquid in order to somewhat destroy the lenticular effect), but basically... Lenticular 3D is still crap.

Those who don't want to 'look ridiculous with one of those stupid glasses' on, though, should get Lenticular systems; it's their best bet for viewing stereographic 3D without glasses *right now* until we can perfect the whole realtime holographic plate thing and get some decent color reproduction off of those as well... -and- have it be affordable.
( barring any even more zany systems such as helical 3D displays which are more intended for volumetric displays than stereographic 3D etc. etc. )

Re:brightness

[Beardo the Bearded]

Your eye responds to images logarithmically, so if you get a bright flash then a dead time, you still see that bright flash for a short period. (Not meaning burn-in.)

One of the techniques for overdriving an LED is to pulse it. A regular LED will die very quickly if you throw 300 mA through it, but if you drive it with a pulse train where the average doesn't exceed the max current for the device, it can sustain a brightness almost equal to the 300 mA level.

Re:Viewing angle??

[snowraver1]

Two angles only, but maybe if you got cuddly and placed your head on someone else's you might have some luck. There is a diagram of the film here [mydigitallife.info] It seems to suggest that with larger screens, the edges of the screen will fade out due to light not reflecting cleanly off the ridges of the film. Maybe this can be fixed by using variable sized ridges, but that would require a special LCD with variable sized pixels, which introduces new problems, and you still only have one viewing spot.

The operation works as follows. Taken from here: [nikkeibp.co.jp] "Sumitomo 3M utilized the directionality so that the light from the left LED light source comes to the right eye and the light from the right LED light source comes to the left eye. And the company enabled to view 3D images with the naked eye by synchronizing the lighting of the left LED light source and the display of the image seen by the right eye (and the lighting of the right LED light source and the display of the image seen by the left eye).

Furthermore, it is possible to show 2D images by using the right and left LED light sources at the same time and displaying the same image for both the right and left eyes. Therefore, it is easy to switch between 2D and 3D images.