At
E3 this past summer, we got our first taste of the
Nintendo 3DS, and early impressions were good: compelling 3D effect sans glasses from its Sharp-sourced
parallax barrier LCD. But, as soon as we moved the thing it became clear that the viewing angle on the effect is woefully slim. This is a problem DoCoMo is said to have at least reduced with its glasses-free LCD, relying on eight lenticular lenses to offer a 30 degree viewing angle -- on the horizontal plane. Vertically you still have to be perfectly aligned, but the company hopes to remove that restriction before products based on this tech are released in the next year or two. It's a bit early, but we're already having flashbacks to young LCD manufacturers battling to deliver the widest viewing angles while maintaining full contrast. Hopefully that means in the not-too-distant future everyone will have 180-degree 3D LCDs -- and they'll all be dirt cheap, too.
posted July 14th 2010 8:08AM
I'm sure 3D will have a definite future in our homes
@MichaelJJackson
Bring on the 4D porn already.
We have that already, it's called Sex with actual people (assuming the 4th D is time btw)
@MichaelJJackson Yep - hopefully the 1st gen will gain enough traction for this sort of next-gen competition to continue into the future.
@MichaelJJackson
Hey MJ!
I heard that your corpse was incinerated, made into plastic and processed into PS3 consoles so that children will still play with you.
@GenericPoster Wait...doesn't DVDA already have four Ds?
@Kangal Children play with ps3s?
@edgore
I see what you did there.
Well played sir, well played.
oh glasses free... the ultimate mecca for 3d next gen... :)
@hammydbest
I am waiting for holographic display, thank you. 3D is just a gimmick not everyone can watch it.
@Ceyran
And the color-blind can't enjoy color-tv, yet it wasn't a reason not to adopt it.
@JonE Colorblind doesn't mean you can't see colors at all. Current 3D technology has enough issues that it really shouldn't be fully adopted, and I'm not talking about people who can't see 3D. I'm talking about people who get severe headaches from the low framerate and motion blur, the bad contrast, and halos that many people see around objects in the foreground. It's not ready for primetime.
@proppat I got a headache in about 15 seconds when demo'ing a Samsung unit in store.
However I can deal with the no battery $1 glasses type 3D at the cinema.
I'm one of those people though who can't stand being in a store with flickering halogen lights nobody else can see and I couldn't enjoy 1080i so waited to buy a new TV when 1080p was fully adopted.
I wont buy anything 3D until it's glasses free with decent viewing angle, would have to be at least 30degree verticle and 60 degree horizontal to really be worth owning..
I still have an LCOS 720p TV. Skipped 1080p, LED, LCD, plasma and now this.
Waiting for 4D so I can revert time and regain my life because of shows like The Prisoner remake.
@grub
And some one on earth actually made those LCOS TVs..and even managed to find a (paying?) customer ? Some miracle, if this is true.
Good to see 3D taking steps forward now let me hook this up to a 80 inch plasma and run the new xbox games with it
The problem with lenticular lens 3D is that:
1) It cannot be turned off i.e. 3D only
2) Expensive
3) For motion pictures, needs to be shot with a very, very special camera.
The technology has been there for more than 5 years... Same applies to continuous motion parallax
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEhCSaCekDI
I would have loved to see a 3DS (or better yet, a PSP) with lenticular lens or continuous motion parallax instead of parallax barrier..
A good alternative is continuous motion parallax.
@TareG how about if you put the same image in both views? Also, Philips has a patent on 2D/3D switchable lenticuar lens.
@TareG It can probably _display_ 2D by feeding it non stereoscopic data. IE, it works by outputting a slightly different image to each eye. By sending the identical image to each eye the image should appear 2d (no stereoscopic information).
The real problem is you lose 1/2 your resolution in one direction due to the lenticular screen (this could be what you meant actually), so it would not be as nice displaying 2d as a regular monitor (one without a lens), not to mention that moving your head out of the 3d sweet spot is still possibly going to cause issues even in 2d mode.
Displaying movies etc on a lenticular display is basically just displaying 2 images that are interleaved into one. I cant see how there would be any problem displaying movies on a lenticular screen or why you would need any very special camera beyond a standard stereoscopic camera - once you have stereoscopic pairs, you can just combine them on computer either in real time or in a preprocess step for display on a lenticular display.
@WiredEarp
No buddy, can't do that. A stereoscopic camera would work for parallax barrier, shutter glasses, or polarizing glasses 3D displays.
For lenticular lens motion picture you need to have the footage shot with a very special "lenticular camera", which has something between 5-8 lens arranged next to each other.
And of course HD playback with true HD resolution is not a commercial option yet.
@TareG Hi. You are taking the term "lenticular lens" and giving it more specific meaning than it has. For a lenticular lens that's set up for 2 views (stereo), a regular stereo camera is all you need. For a setup that involves more views, you need a camera angle on every possible view; there are many ways of going about that. In any case, you use a computer to combine all the various views into a format suitable for a particular display. Also, such a display can be 2D assuming that the 2D data is reformatted appropriately and you don't mind the apparent loss of resolution (the 2D data must be duplicated for each different view).
@TareG Just because the viewing angle is wider doesn't mean you get more views of the content. This just allows you to see the same 3D image even if you look at the screen from the side rather than needing to look at the screen straight on.
Cool.
Maybe we can get virtual reality in another 10-20 years.
You cannot have 180 degree glasses free 3D, because your eyes should see different images. If you have 2 views, that's at most 90 degree per view. However, for viewing distance of 30cm, and distance between eyes of 70mm, anything wider than 30 degrees is unnecessary.
Ask Google "2*atan(7/30) in degrees".
Lenticular lens technology has been around for years. Do your research, Engadget.
@reuvenb
Agreed. This is the difference between blogism and journalism (good journalism). This is why I appreciate sites like http://anandtech.com where its common to find thoroughly researched articles that are both interesting and incredibly informative. I find it a nice alternative to these 'fast food' articles with little substance.
@MagnetMan
Thanks for that, a more PC orientated non biased gadgets site, bookmarked.
Engadget will always be close to my heart however.
@MagnetMan
Bookmarked too. Loving the articles so far.
Ah, the parallax view gets rereleased :)
/obscuremoviereference
@TheAmazingWJV
Love that movie - great reference.
How 3D is something if the viewing angle is "limited".
I want holograms damn it. I want to be able to walk all the way around something while looking at it. I want to be able to crouch down and look up at the image. I want to be able to get on my tippy toes and look down.
@tad604
Then VR-goggles are for you!
Current 180-degree LCDs are not exactly dirt cheap. LCDs with TN panels are, but they don't have 180-degrees viewing angles.
no glasses 3D welcome.
There's a big factor missing in the description of this display. Remember that 3D stereo viewing is achieved by delivering a different image to each eye. If your eyes are moving with respect to the display, then one of two things must be happening (assuming no glasses):
(1) the display is tracking your eyes and adjusting itself to make sure each eye still gets the right image; or
(2) there are various "zones" where your eyes get the right images, but the view is messed up as you move from zone to zone.
Which is it?
This computar is 1000x as fast this computar. WE are now able to run these program 1000x faster != INNOVATION
Obvious iteration
That is what I am waiting for. No Glasses.
Eight lenticular lenses means eight angles must be rendered. The 3DS has such a restricted viewing angle because it only renders the two perspectives. If it has to render eight perspectives, that would require four times more processing power, and might break games that make assumptions about what direction the two cameras are pointing in.
You could try to cheat by matching the lenses in pairs showing the same two angles, but one of the advantages of a higher number of lenses is that the distance to the screen becomes variable too (since your two eyes would see different images based on how close they are). This trick would make that impossible.
That said, if they require developers to handle the angle thing ahead of time, a future "3DS Lite" might be able to take advantage of this by packing in the more powerful hardware to handle it.
IN 2008 there were a number of demonstration glasses-free 3D TVs around the place- I saw one in a cinema in Leicester Square, one in the 02 Arena and one in Harrods. They all had only 8-ish differend points where you could see 3D, but in those points (which were quite large and spread out) the effect was phenomenal. Much better than the new 3D TVs I tried in a Sony shop which worked with glasses.