3D w/o Goggles 90
jamner writes "A Yahoo Daily News article mentions that computer users may soon be able to work on screens with displays that give the appearance of being three dimensional. The company is Deep Visual Imaging at www.actualdepth.com and their products page." They accomplish it by layering LCDs, so while its not going to fake a true 3d workspace, the depth would still add substantially to many applications (well, it would make quake cooler, and I'm sure desktop apps could benefit, but I suspect the medical industry has more important uses).
Re:A matter of time (Score:1)
Re:3D display (Score:1)
uhm (Score:1)
Build your own 3D screen (Score:1)
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HMD/goggles aren't just for 3D (Score:4)
These are:
In other words, the logical technology+market progression would be to expand HMD to encompass 2D and 3D needs in a lower-cost & commercially viable manner, rather than push excessively specialized hardware. The perfect package for me would include a set of relatively high-resolution (1280x1024) 2D goggles with a motion sensor configured for 3+ desktops, and a Datahand keyboard [datahand.com] pair. Those interested in a 3D configuration would need only make a software reconfiguration to adjust the motion sensor input to provide perspective based on user motion, rather than physically emulating single-position stereoscopic vision. For me, it'd be far nicer than the multiple-monitor setup I have now, and would fit in a locked drawer when I wasn't using it.
A layered 3D desktop monitor would be kinda nifty, but a minor usability advance compared to a much more flexible HMD. But I suppose I'll have to be happy with the castoffs from the gamers...
J
Cheese. (Score:2)
They just use layers of LCDs? I currently use a set of wireless Elsa Revelator glasses [elsa.com]. They are cheap, (~100-150 dollars), work with any DirectX or OpenGL game, and most nvidia cards.
With the light off and the SBLive on high, it's the only way to game :)
grubRe:Old thingy? (Score:1)
Actuality Systems, from what I can tell, displays 3D images by rotating a screen around very fast and then displaying different slices of an image onto that screen. I believe it gives you a "truer" 3D display, at the drawback of having to view it inside a big glass sphere.
ActualDepth appears to be using the hi-tech equivalent of those 3D images you see on the front of children's books sometimes. I'm guessing they're going after the consumer market, while Actuality Systems is probably going after industries.
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Re:This is good.. (Score:2)
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No good for me (Score:1)
Makes some aspects of life a bitch, like RC airplanes and driving...
Blatant, manufactured 3d I can pick out, but your everyday depth perception... uh-uh. Doesn't work. So, thank you very much, I'll stick with regular LCDs.
(Although I am interested in VR headsets. Any sites you can recommend that deal with these things? Reviews, news, etc?)
-lf
autostereoscopic displays (Score:3)
Yet another 3D-without-goggles thing. Yawn. (Score:4)
So excuse my scepticism if I say that I'll believe it when I see it.
Re:I remember a form of 3D without "goggles"... (Score:1)
Yah. What do you know, anyway? (Score:1)
I remember a form of 3D without "goggles"... (Score:3)
Back in the mid-late 80's (perhaps earlier?) I remember watching an episode of "That's Incredible", about these two guys (may have been professors?) at a university or college (in California, I believe) who created a form of 3D that didn't require glasses.
In fact, it didn't require both eyes! That's right, you could close one eye while viewing it, and it would still look 3D!
They broadcasted a few video clips of the effect on the episode of "That's Incredible", and it really was amazing. The two dudes who came up with the system said they did it with some kind of "black box" device they had created, that could be inserted between a video source and the display, and it would "make" the image 3D. You could tape the clips, and it woud still look fine if you played them back.
At the time, I was stunned - still am - that such an effect could be produced. I remember that the images were kind of shakey (the inventors of the process admitted this on the broadcast), but not annoyingly so. I remember taping the episode, but I have since lost the tape. I remember trying to play it back, closing one eye - and yes, it all worked! There was depth to the image (this was the one "problem" with it - the depth went "into" the screen, not out of it - so it looked like you were looking through a window - but it was still nice).
Has anybody heard of these men, the episode, what the technique was, what happened to them, how it works, etc? I have seen many strange ways to get 3D - but this one has always taken the cake as the strangest, since it relies on a fundamental brain process to trick the brain into seeing 3D (even with one eye!!!)...
Worldcom [worldcom.com] - Generation Duh!
Re:Significant benefit for Visually Impaired (Score:2)
Re:A matter of time (Score:1)
Re:Another 3D approach (Score:1)
Flip the left hand image about its vertical axis, and place it next to the other image. Then hold a small mirror held perpendicularly to the screen with your nose resting on the edge of the mirror so that your right eye looks directly at the right-hand image, and your left eye looks into the mirror at the virtual image of the left-hand picture. Jiggle the mirror about a bit until the images coincide. It worked for me using a couple of digital photos of my front room taken from a few inches apart, and I found it alarmingly successful at inducing a headache.
And no, that's not all I was playing with.
Another 3D approach (Score:2)
http://www.zipworld.com.au/~surturz/threed/3dinde
-SurturZ
Re:cracker jack box (Score:2)
That is indeed the most promising option open for real 3d. The idea is stunningly simple: if you decrease the angel of dispersion of the lenses, you can engineer it so that one eye sees one frame of the "animation" while the other eye sees the next.
Not great if they are two successive frames in time, but if instead each frame shows a picture from a slightly different viewpoint, you get 3d. Instead of a fixed picture, you put that cracker jack lens (a fresnel lens, in effect) infront of a display with the resolution set to show two pixels per ridge -- one per eye.
The only problem is that it will be pretty sensitive to keeping your head in the "sweet spot". And the positioning of the lens wrt the pixels on the screen is tricky, but that is all ok, because this sucker is cheap. the only hardware you need is a massproduced piece of plastic. The rest is software, interleaving the stripes from each eye's view.
Not as nice as a hologram, true, but in terms of bag for buck, really hard to beat.
Re:Been done (Score:2)
However, each additional pixel you allocate per lens implies a corresponding decrease in horizontal resolution. One workaround is to keep it monochrome: this effectively multiplies the horizontal resolution of [formerly color] LCD panel by three. Otherwise, the lenses become so wide that you'll end up noticing the horisontal banding. Another workaround would be to stagger the lenticular lenses (more of a hassle to manufacture, tho), so that the pixels no longer get alligned in one vertical line.
*cough* bullshit *cough* (Score:3)
Since the LCD is 24 bpp at 60 hz, don't you think you should figure the same for your monitor?
1600x1200 = 1,920,000 pixels
1,920,000 pixels * 24 bits/pixel = 46,080,000 bits
46,080,000 bits * 60 Hz = 2.76 Gb/s (where Gb = 1,000,000,000 bits)
I don't know where you got your 46Mb/s from, but it's quite a bit off. Rudimentary logic tells us that 10 layers of a lower resolution is going to take less than 10 times the bandwidth, not the 200+ times the bandwidth you claim.
First think that flashes through my mind... (Score:2)
3d gaming (Score:2)
Theres a company who's owned by the same investors that own GT Interactive (Doom and others), who have something in the works. I wish I remembered their name off hand. Using something that resembles sort of a voting booth, they're able to project an extremely high quality 3d image using mirrors, and something reminiscent of one of the old screen televisions, rgb colored lights from 4 angles that get color and depth values from computer generated output run on I think it was an SGI =( fuck I wish I could remember the name of the company offhand.
Anyways the original intent for these gizmos were for use in trade shows, and things of that nature. On the way out from consulting at the company my friend and I were speaking to some of the game developers at GTI, who stated that they were supposedly slated to do something with the company in the future. (this is rumored so don't quote me)
When I saw the gizmo's though I was impressed as all hell by the images though, and unfortunately the techies responsible for its creation were pricks who didn't care to shred any kind of info on how exactly its run... Anyways I'm hoping someone would have seen something similar at a Linuxworld expo or some other conference, I'm sure its been seen, maybe not payed attention to though.
Oh well as for this company their PDF's tell nothing, but they look colorful, they do say they run an PII @ 800mhz but no words on OS or anything else. And they're huge files for such little information. Will this be another one of those "smell the internet" schemes?
Been done (Score:1)
Course, it was like a flat LCD with a lens fused to the front or somesuch, but it did work. And the technology worked.
Re:Not so great (addition) (Score:1)
Not so great (Score:2)
Re:For some reason I doubt this will ever be commo (Score:1)
No special input needed - it's just 2 SVGA inputs. 2 computers, or a dual-head card, is all you need.
The back screen is a bit fuzzy, and the depth separation is about 2 cm (too big!), but it's very very cool. Our unit is now at Fort Leavenworth being utilized by an Army research laboratory for future combat systems. We bought a 2nd, and I hope I get to play with it some more.
Cheers,
Brian
Re:Only 2 planes in Z? (Score:1)
There are just 2 planes in the z dimension. However, a 3d rendered image on the near plane can trick your brain into thinking you are seeing a true 3d image. It's pretty neat.
I think Deep Imaging has the wrong marketing angle. It seems pretty useless for the average consumer, but I see thousands of military applications in confined spaces, like aircraft. You'd be surprised how much more info you can cram into a screen when you have one more dimension to use.
Cheers,
Brian
I've been using this monitor (Score:1)
I think consumer use of something like this is limited, at best, but in military, medical, maintenence, etc... limitless.
Our software demo was simply a CAS mission (Close Air Support) where a pair of attack aircraft enter a warzone to attack a mechanized infantry unit. The mission was complete with artillery fire, standoff weapons, enemy aircraft, SAM sites, etc. We chose to display ground units, terrain, etc, on the far plane, and air units, threat rings, etc on the near plane. It was very cool, and very easy to determine what was happening even in very "busy" environments with multiple threats. On a traditional monitor, the screen would have been much too cluttered.
Best of all, the screen is flat. It's only a few inches deep, and is ideal for confined spaces, like the interior of an aircraft (or any other location where space is at a premium).
Some other military applications we've thought of are putting an IR scope image on one plane, and a light intensified image on the other, letting Abrams operators access both scopes simulaneously, rather than having to flip from one to the other.
I've dealt alot with Bruce, their East Coast sales rep - quality guy. Lots of fun. :) I know Deep Imaging is trying to get us to release our demo application, so we are working thru QA as I type. I expect that, if we get it released, they might start using that as an additional demo at trade shows. I know Bruce thought it was awesome.
Cheers,
Brian
Re:*cough* bullshit *cough* (Score:1)
Re:3D pointing devices? (Score:1)
http://www.labtec.com
Awesome!! (Score:1)
Awright, new technology!!! Do you think I can hook my Virtual Boy into this thing??
Re:I remember a form of 3D without "goggles"... (Score:2)
http://www.ccrs.nrcan.gc.ca/ccrs/eduref/sra
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Old thingy? (Score:1)
Oh well. Nice to see that they are still around.
Too much vapor in computer companies latly.
some REAL autostereoscopic w/o goggles research (Score:1)
bah quicktime animation (Score:2)
Re:This is good.. (Score:1)
Yes, they [alexburke.ca] sure [alexburke.ca] can [alexburke.ca]. (At least, [alexburke.ca] that's what students of an unnamed university [alexburke.ca] claim [alexburke.ca]...)
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Re:It's not currently cool, but it has potential (Score:2)
This two-layer screen is probably a two-layer hack. They haven't designed a system that can be layered, or they would be advertising that.
-Erik
DTI (Score:1)
Or... (Score:2)
I know some people that can acomplish the same effect using LSD....
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Much better than layered LCD has been achieved (Score:1)
I found this [stereo3d.com] page on Stereo3D [stereo3d.com] about two months ago. It is a showcase of several 3D-sans-glasses products.
If it wasn't so expensive it would be a great hobby. I got a pair of discontinued shutter glasses on E-Bay, and they are pretty good, if glitchy. And so far they only work on Win98.
Wow.. Imagine the Porn Industry.. (Score:2)
Re:Been done (Score:1)
Some company did this a while back, it was on slashdot actually.
Link [philips.com] The Philips 3D LCD has a much wider sweet spot, several people can see the effect at once.
i wanna see! (Score:1)
past /. articles (Score:2)
one [slashdot.org]
two [slashdot.org]
three [slashdot.org]
four [slashdot.org]
My experience with this monitor (Score:2)
"Does it look like real 3D?!?!"
My exact response was "ummm, uhhh, I guess so?"
The image was somewhat dim and only had the slightest bit of depth to it, not quite what I was expecting. Still, it was better than looking at a flat psuedo 3D image on a CRT or plain single-layer LCD display.
It'd say it's a good monitor if you have deep pockets and a good imagination. *shrug*
cracker jack box (Score:2)
You know. the one with the plastic ridges which would "animate" when you looked at it at different angles, n' stuff...
=P
E.
Where's the beef? (Score:1)
To their credit, they do make good use of empty space on their website
How It Works - Dual Monitor Video Cards (Score:5)
aww man....wait that's still cool (Score:1)
. . .
Drawer-full of Barf Bags (Score:3)
We had enough people barfing just trying to find thier way around a room. Could you imagine how bad it will be when these things actually hit the market affordably?
On display at NHK Studio Park (Tokyo) (Score:2)
So excuse my scepticism if I say that I'll believe it when I see it.
Then come to NHK Studio Park in Shibuya, Tokyo; they've got a 3D-without-goggles system on permanent display, and though it only works well when you stand at a certain distance directly in front of the screen, it works excellently within those limitations.
And that's not even state-of-the-art anymore. At a digital-TV fair they had earlier this month, they had what was essentially a hologram on display. Yes, really. Not quite the same because you can't look at it from the side, but within the viewing angle (about 60 degrees IIRC) it's a 3D image standing in midair. You could even stick your hand (or your face) in it like they used to do in all those sci-fi shows. Frankly, it knocked my socks off.
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BACKNEXTFINISHCANCEL
There is another 3D screen! (Score:1)
This is fully 3D screens, you see objects from another angle as you move you head in relation to the screen.
According to the sals rep there the screen needs 8 seperate 2D frames, i.e. 8 seperate channels.
The only snag about them was that on certian angles a verical sector probably 1/8 of the screen width tended to go out of fokus and become difuse. When I asked about if it was a prototype problem, they said "no, it's the laws of physics."
They had seqence from a Doomish style game, reprocessed into a 3D sequence, but it was really cool, the gaming industry is going to eat it alive.
The price quite on the 15" screens I got awas US$ 5000,-.
slashdot of the future... (Score:3)
Historic Link (Score:2)
This is kind of fickle (Score:1)
Re:A matter of time (Score:1)
Thank god that........ (Score:1)
Murphy's Law of Copiers
This is for kiosks, not end users (Score:2)
In this situation, I can definitely see the advantage. I'd walk up to and play with a kiosk that had such a display at least once.
Only 2 planes in Z? (Score:3)
Some older games.. (Score:1)
Re:Yet another 3D-without-goggles thing. Yawn. (Score:1)
Didn't they cobble it together in their garage?
The real problem is to find the killer app for it. More than likely to be in games I imagine, if someone is ever able to make a transparent, layred E-ink solution. They could print them out like the phones we're supposed to see this summer.
This is an old idea (Score:1)
We live in a 3d world... (Score:2)
But what about entities that are created in our mind and given a physical reality for our purposes such as a spreadsheet or database model? Imagine the capability of designing schema relationships in 3 dimensions. Or creating a financial report utilizing layers of cells. How will this affect UML tools? What potential does this have on development applications?
yeah and pigs will fly.. (Score:1)
BIG SCREEN (Score:1)
Re:yeah and pigs will fly.. (Score:1)
Re:Where's the beef? (Score:1)
Q: How fast is the service?
A: Our service is the fastest available!
Duh...
Re:Where's the beef? (Score:1)
Stupid FAQ [futureway.com]
On-screen navigation (Score:1)
Wow! 3-D Spam! (Score:1)
Just what we needed -- even if we didn't think to ask.
Hey now... (Score:4)
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Autostereoscopic Monitor from NYU (Score:1)
Re:bah quicktime animation (Score:1)
Possible sub-heading (Score:1)
A matter of time (Score:1)
It was only a matter of time until people started coming out with displays such as this. Layering 10 transparent LCDs would be good also.
The problems is the bandwidth needed to drive such a beast. Imagine 10 layers (not very many at all) and 1024x768x24 at 60Hz. This means you need a graphics card capable of handling over 12Gb/s of data. In comparison, my 1600x1200 monitor only needs 46Mb/s of bandwidth.
But then, bandwidth is a widespread problem that is getting more attention than other problems. Imagine an HDTV receiver that gets 10 channels synchronized to a 10 layer monitor... 2.5D movies, anyone?
I've seen something better.... (Score:2)
From what I could tell (I have a vision problem, so I was starting at this monitor for a few minutes wondering what was so special about it) it works the same way as the hologram on Coke machines in pubs (the ones where the image moves with your head).
There where infact 2 images projected onto cones. When at the right distance, each eye will see a different image (a-la 3D goggles) giving a true 3D image.
Of course, this technology assumes people have the same distance between the eyes, and have no eye dominance problem (I'm *very* left eye dominant, I only see 2dimensions, which is why I didn't see why the monitor was good at first.
I havn't been able to find any info about it at the cannon website though....
This will change the way wars are fought (Score:1)
Unknowing teenagers and gaming enthusiasts will download these very entertaining "combat simulation" mods for Quake, install them and go to town fraggin. Unknown to them, however, is that the enemies they are fighting against are actual real life enemies on a foreign battlefield and that their quick reflexes and Quake deathmatch mastery are serving the Forces of Democracy. Each motion is transmitted via satellie to a HMRKV dedicated to this user.
In addition, multiple gamers may command a single HMRKV. Certain server side algorithms are employed to identify the most effective killer and those commands are the ones sent to the HMRKV.
Id software is nothing more than a front for the CIA these days. Sad but true.
3D pointing devices? (Score:3)
Potential risks? (Score:1)
Re:Significant benefit for Visually Impaired (Score:1)
But I do agree with you that a tactile display would be extremely cool.
But I'm looking forward to when we get transparent displays with resolutions of tenths of microns (ok, this is a bit far in the future) so we can have real 3-D holographic displays. That would be even cooler (at least for those of us with eyes).
It's not currently cool, but it has potential (Score:4)
This could have exciting implications for future GUI design, and if they perfect the manufacturing process to the point where more than 2 planes can be sandwiched (say, 32 or 64?) then we start seeing some really interesting opportunities for GUI design, not to mention the artistic value, which is often inappropriately overlooked in technology.
Imagine a GUI that gives you a degree of depth inherently without requiring large resources - buttons could have 3d edges that were handled at the hardware level, rather than software - thus making for better resource management, and therefore leading to more efficient GUI performance. This may seem minor, and perhaps it is, but I can see how this would have potential.
Once we get up to the 64-pixel Z-plane level of production, I can see widgets being designed that use the Z-plane to provide ancilliary info feedback to the user without requiring any more interaction on the users part than to just move their head and look closer.
I was thinking about this similar "liveliness" aspect of GUI design the other day when playing with http://www.praystation.com/ (excellent web page) - it'd be nice if there were some way to produce a screen that could figure out what you were looking at, perhaps by bouncing something off your retina and doing geometry to get a point of what you're looking at. In the 80's, marketing devices that used lasers to see what you were looking at were used to do market research of TV commercials - it'd be nice to see something like this built into LCD screens, so we could do away with the mouse altogether.
But the thought I had was that, with something like this, the longer you look at the control the more information it could provide you - bringing a "liveliness" aspect to the control that we don't currently have with the static 2d shapes we call user interfaces right now.
Having a 3D screen with a 64-layer Z-plane would be another way to add 'liveliness' to an interface... you could for example build a mixing console that provides you with channel insert information, with amplituded represented in depth.
I'd say 64-layer Z-planes would be the next major step for this company. Get things to that point, and the GUI design world starts to get *really* interesting...
3d is already out there, guys (Score:1)
this is just a trick to make us buy more equiptment, just like video cards that didn't even let you play video tapes.
For some reason I doubt this will ever be common.. (Score:1)
Re:autostereoscopic displays (Score:1)
also, the guys from 4D-Vision have acomplished a Doom- (or was it Quake?)- Port and a auto-stereoscopic version of GlView, the underlying engine of the blaxxun-Contact-VRML97-browser. I've seen both of it in action on the Web3D-Conference earlier this year and it looked pretty impressive
If you've got the money, it can be done (Score:1)
It was WICKED COOL! It was also incredibly expensive of course.
As you say, the software would be no problem by now.
The catch is the goggles. They were somewhat low resolution. You can only fit so many pixels in a display small enough to wear, though I'm sure we can do better now than we could a few years ago. The displays have to be aligned JUST RIGHT for each person. They are heavy, at least they used to be (I don't remember whether the ones I tried were CRT or LCD). The helmet has to be tight to keep them in place. Adjustable helmets just don't cut it, at least if you want to move around much. Probably the only way for this to be practical would be to build them on a motorcycle type helmet, which would have to come in several sizes and fit tightly. Now as a long time motorcycle rider I wouldn't mind, but most people (i.e. consumers) would not want to use them for long periods.
Also the goggles kept fogging up. I think a couple of little fans would have helped that.
And yes, they do have head-tracking devices, which work reasonably well. They don't work by gyroscopes, but by a sort of triangulation method with 3 sensors mounted on the walls and a transmitter on the helmet or vice versa. They had a transmitter on a hand held device too (I suppose the guns and swords had two, to establish where they were pointing).
See through screens have been tried as well (think heads-up displays for pilots). I don't remember the details. If I had the capital, I'd love to work on it.
Re:If you've got the money, it can be done (Score:1)
Re:yeah and pigs will fly.. (Score:1)
seriously
see my post above.
This is good.. (Score:5)
Re:Yet another 3D-without-goggles thing. Yawn. (Score:1)