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Hardware

3D graphics on Modified LCD Flatscreen 42

Posted by CmdrTaco from the how-about-quake-in-3d? dept.
Christopher Neufeld writes "New Scientist maganize reports this week on a company designing a 3D vision system which uses a modified LCD flatscreen. The two images are interlaced on the screen, and a holographic lens directs the light from alternating rows to different eyes. "
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3D graphics on Modified LCD Flatscreen More

3D graphics on Modified LCD Flatscreen

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  • Holographic Lenses work? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I've been wondering about this for a while.

    If I make a hologram of a lens, is the hologram a functional lens? Can I put a holographic lens over a book and see a larger image of the text?

    For that matter, can I replace eyeglass lenses
    with thin holographic film? Not only would that be lighter, but I'd like to use a more complex lens system so I can put a magnified LCD to one side. (OK, so I might need a light source to activate the holographic lenses..but I'll be installing power in the frames for the LCD anyway...)

  • Applet demonstrating 3d without glasses (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The Media Research Lab at NYU is doing research on something even cooler: autostereo, or 3D without glasses. AFAIK they haven't built anything yet, but a pretty cool applet demonstrating the concept is at the following URL:

    http://mrl.nyu.edu/perlin/demos/aut ostereo.html [nyu.edu]

    ~k.lee

  • Cool! (Score:1)

    by kovacsp ( 113 )
    That has got to be one of the coolest things I've seen in a while. Can't wait until they see the light of day. Of course, they'll be prohibitively expensive until everything goes LCD...

    What ever happened to the Polymer displays? I was especially interested in those back in my Chemical Engineering days. (see my bio)

  • Metabyte (Score:1)

    by benc ( 573 )
    Metabyte (makers of the Wicked3D cards) who were working with H3D bought out the whole 3d shutter glasses technology from H3D when they went under. They're being sold as the Wicked3D eyeSCREAM.

    www.wicked3d.com [wicked3d.com]

  • I know the polorised lens at iMax places give me a headache. I just can't train my eyes to focus on a screen 30 feet away when objects are only a couple feet away.

    Don't know if this is a problem for everyone, but it is for me. then again I can't quit figgure out why you would want true 3d for /. email or other news things. For all but a few things it seems an interesting toy. (note that games are by definition a toy, and I'm generally not a gamer)

  • Book (Score:1)

    by PHroD ( 1018 )
    I read some scifi book, in which they used this same technique to display 3d info on PDAs etc...pretty cool :)

    ---------------------------------
    HotsOS home http://hotsos.8m.com/
  • Repeat after me. "Crystal shutter glasses"
  • It is possible to produce a real, full-colour hologram by holographically photographing the object with red, blue and green coherent light. You have to get the angles right, however, for the different diffraction of the different wavelengths.

    Saw it described in a big book about holography many years ago.

    Static.

  • Note: I have not done any recent research into this!

    Holograms are created from the interference patterns between light reflected from the object and a reference beam (that's why coherent light must be used). I also know you use ASA 5 film, which means really really tiny silver-halide crystals, obviously down in the size of the wavelengths.

    So. Is anyone working on a) getting enough computing power together to actually create these interference patterns properly? and b) building a suitably high-resolution screen to display them on?

    (FWIW, I've theorised that holograms work because the interference pattern makes the light you're looking at it by directional. The net effect of which is you see a different image for each eye.)

    Static.

  • As the article states, the 3D effect is created by directing one separate light source at each eye. Your glasses will work just like they always have.
  • The article states that the 2D "mode" makes it behave just like any other monitor. In order to get the 3D effect, you need either a driver or applications designed to interlace the two stereo images in a manner that allows them to be directed at the individual eyes.

    The article seems to imply that the light sources would be movable depending on which mode of operation the monitor was in. I don't know how this can be controlled. If it requires some software driver support, someone will need to code some software drivers in order for it to work.
  • I could see someone playing QuakeII with one of these. --Dodging his head back and forth as hyperblaster shots zing by!

    "In true sound..." -Agents of Good Root
  • Does anyone remeber your old Sega Master System? No? Think harder.

    That wonderfully useless gaming system, because all your friends had Nintendos. Well, they had 3D glasses way back then...Interlaced frames on your TV screen, and the 3D glasses had polarized LCDs which showed alternating frames in either eye.

    True 3D way-back-then.

    (Remeber Zaxon 3D and Maze-Hunter?)
  • The D-Beam thingy used on Roland MC-505's would be perfect for something like a pda using this display technology.
    The D-Beam translates hand movements in a 3d volume into midi messages.
    Using one of these with a hand held using this 3d display would rock.


  • This technique for 3-D visualization is OLD. Sure, using a hologram is new, but from the sound of it (and some experience with holograms years ago) it seems like a step back.

    Systems I've seen in the past that do this use those ribbed plastic screens they glue on the front of baseball cards and the like to make them 3-D. The 3-D effect drops out and reforms itself as you move to the side, but there's not just one "sweet spot", there's a number of them moving in either direction from the screen.

    When I was young I played with this idea using one of those plastic sheets and an Atari 800 hooked up to a TV.

    I saw a demo a few years back that used a high-refresh monitor and a rotating mirror to project 3-d images that not only could be viewed from the side, but your perspective on what you were looking at would be different from the side than the front. You could move around the display and see the side of things...
  • Old tech, only now it works on an LCD. I bought some 3d glasses from H3D Entertainment last year, works great with quake and quake2, and some other games (it requires modified gl drivers). Yes, it's interlaced, and comes with LCD shutter glasses, and as such, half the vertical resolution, but when you can run 600 or 768 vertical anyway with hardware accel, it doesn't matter -- the added visual depth is worth it. It's a very nice system, but last I heard, h3D Ent went out of business. It really adds quite a bit to the gaming experience.

    Now, everyone is selling something like this, and putting a business spin on it (View your charts in 3d!) or the science spin (molecuar visualizing, but they've had 3d views of that crap for years).
  • A holograph of a lens won't act as a lens, but a holograph can be made that does act as a lens.

    If you want flat lenses there is a simpler solution: Frenel. Yes, they look a bit strange, but situated 1/2 inch from your eye you can't see the surface irregularities. They have the added advantage (?) that they'll make everything look clear while making your eyes look fuzzy.
  • They came to my old company almost a year ago and demo'd a unit. It was pretty impressive... all they had were still images and they were interested in trading an animation for a unit. It works in windows only because the viewer application is written in MFC... Your head has to be in the right position in front of it. I think at that time they were going for about US 7000$, and they were marketing them mainly at casinos to be like a 3D video poker machine....
  • holograms don't require a single color of light. they "just" require the same wavelengths in the same places. the only way we can achieve this now is with coherent laser light. ordinary incoherent white light does not have this property.


    A holographic lens, which winds up looking like a fancy diffraction grating for simple lens configurations, should work on noncoherent light, but will have very nasty chromatic dispersion (i.e. focal length is very different for different wavelengths).

  • Is it possible to combine red and blue laser beams into a single beam of synthetic white light?


    You could combine red, green, and blue beams to get something that looked white, but it would be "white" in the same way that your monitor is "white". Shine it on a prism and you'll get three lines instead of a rainbow.


    You'd still get bad chromatic dispersion from holographic lenses exposed to this light; you'd just see three images in three colours instead of a rainbow-coloured smear.


    Also, you'd have to use coherent light to illuminate the scene, not just the lens. It's light reflected from the scene that you care about.

  • The real question is what to do about Voodoo and it's kin? I know that Voodoo can use two cards interlaced, but how hard to get a driver to support the 3d monitor with that?


    AFAIK, in SLI mode both voodoo cards are listening to the same bus traffic. One acknowledges register writes, and the other doesn't send acknowledgement signals but still reads triangle and command data. This saves considerably on bus bandwidth (you only need to send the data once), but means that you can't send different triangle data to each card in a SLI pair.


    OTOH, it's been a few months since I've seen a detailed description of this, so I might be making a mistake somewhere.

  • I'm just wondering if some day most Displays incorporate some similar 3d-ish technology, if they'll work for people who only have one eye to see out of.


    You should still see the display clearly. In order to get the 3D effect, both eyes have to be presented with clear images. Losing one image gets rid of the apparent depth, but the other image still looks fine.


    I strongly suspect that most displays and platforms will have a 2D mode, as I doubt that 3D glasses will be practical in all contexts even if 3D displays do take off.

  • Are you a troll, or just an idiot? YOU CAN'T GET STEREO VISION WITH JUST ONE EYE!!!!


    If you take the time to read the original message:


    Obviously the 3d effect would be lost.


    You will see that the poster was asking if a recognizable _2D_ image would be visible using 3D display with one blind eye. If you look at the screen for an LCD-shutter display without glasses, you see a blurry mess.


    Closing one eye while wearing the glasses, OTOH, gives a clear display. See my other reply.

  • too bad it's only half the vertical resolution. It also looks more position sensitive than the old laptop displays.

    "Trouble is, just because it's obvious doesn't mean it's true"

  • They were demonstrating a similar system at SIGGRAPH last summer in Orlando. It worked so long as you were about 8inches from the screen and were looking straight ahead. Otherwise the images did not line up properly and the effect doesn not work.
  • This is sort of old technology - there was another alternate lines LCD method which was developed IIRC by some New York doctors. I saw it demonstrated in 199?4. It involved a polarising plastic film (muPol) which had alternating lines polarising left and right. This film was carefully stuck to the LCD display of laptop or projector. To see 3D you sent L and R images to odd/even lines and wore light weight standard decoding polarising glasses (no problems with expensive head gear / shutter sync or range of view). The effect was remarkably good. The film was inexpensive. The problem was that the alignment to the LCD was laborious (at that time achieved manually) and the company didn't look to me as though they could market a hotdog at a baseball match... I'm not too surprised to find no evidence whatever on the www of this company but the technology was really very marketable!!
  • Yeah, everyone release 3d systems... But this is the first version I've seen where you don't wear glasses.
  • I remember going to the Telecom '87 exhibition in Geneva. Or was that the Telecom '91? Anyway, one of the 'wonderful new products' on show was a portrait 3D display which worked in a similar manner to this but it had lenses on the front of the screen to focus the pictures correctly for both eyes. It would only work if you sat in exactly the right spot so only one person could look at the screen at any time.

    I remember them saying that the width of the screen determined the 'depth' of the image which you could display. Remember that you only have half the horizontal resolution of your screen available when working in 3D mode! So this portrait display could not display very large or distant objects well but what it could do was still amazing back then.

    I got the impression that it has been technically possible to create 3D displays for some time but the computing power has only recently made it viable to start using such displays for things other than binocular video. How common is binocular video, even though it is technically possible and should be cheap?

  • Hmmmm (Score:1)

    by I-man ( 95468 )
    Now THIS I could play TeamFortress on!

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