Who'd have a 3D TV if they could?
Discussion
I went and looked at some 3D display devices today (blagged my way in using my job - it has to have some perks). I've seen them before, and they have come a looong way in the last 8 years!
for a couple of grand you can get a 23" HD TV that can also show 3D auto steroescopic images.
I was blown away with them and very impressed with the nerds in the way they drive them (if you want me to get into the details / nerdy too mail me).
However, it's a bit of a chicken and egg thing. We (or anybody else in the industry) don't transmit 3D encoded streams as nobody can view them so we wouldn't sell any ad space so nobody buys the TVs. Very much like HD TVs but here (after 20 years in the pipeline) marketing seems to have kicked in and people have bought them even though there's not really much to view yet.
The displays can show normal HD / SD TV and if you send them a 3D encoded video, it shows 3D.
Anyway, to get the ball rolling I think there are a few start points:
The obvious one, that kick-starts all new technology into the mainstream is... Porn!
Or Gaming.
The company that demo'd the kit said they know Phillips is talking to card makers to alter the graphics driver to pump a 3D encoded signal out (I think this should be easy in 90% of modern games using Direct X 3D, but it sounds like it's not).
So, who'd buy one???
for a couple of grand you can get a 23" HD TV that can also show 3D auto steroescopic images.
I was blown away with them and very impressed with the nerds in the way they drive them (if you want me to get into the details / nerdy too mail me).
However, it's a bit of a chicken and egg thing. We (or anybody else in the industry) don't transmit 3D encoded streams as nobody can view them so we wouldn't sell any ad space so nobody buys the TVs. Very much like HD TVs but here (after 20 years in the pipeline) marketing seems to have kicked in and people have bought them even though there's not really much to view yet.
The displays can show normal HD / SD TV and if you send them a 3D encoded video, it shows 3D.
Anyway, to get the ball rolling I think there are a few start points:
The obvious one, that kick-starts all new technology into the mainstream is... Porn!
Or Gaming.
The company that demo'd the kit said they know Phillips is talking to card makers to alter the graphics driver to pump a 3D encoded signal out (I think this should be easy in 90% of modern games using Direct X 3D, but it sounds like it's not).
So, who'd buy one???
castex said:
I'd love one, but then I'm still amazed by holograms and so perhaps not representative...
Same here, that's why I wanted a more normal view, but then I guess these things will always be gadgets for the medium wealthy till they become mainstream.
I was amazed by the price. I was thinking 30 grand or so for the 50" demo unit, but no, it was 8! Ok that's not cheap, and means that only somebody with a fair old wedge would get one, but the same was true of the big plasma displays a couple of years ago. Heck, they're not much less than that now! For the extra 2-3k over the price of the standard 2D units I think they're a bargin!
You brain seems to recoil slightly at first, it knows there's some depth cues there, but not all of them - you know it's 3D, but not why. If you try and reach in to touch the things in the foreground you go a bit odd. You hand is at the same distance as the image, but you can't feel it, you reach through it, but you hand is still appearing in front of it, then you carry on reaching out some more, and touch the screen itself.
The demo of Quake III arena was really good - the 1st person view works well, and the distances involved are perfect for it. I think flying games would suck, and maybe things like Unreal, where you have vast expanses of space. Racing games should be alright - especially if you're in the middle of a pack of cars.
I've just fired off a few emails to them this moring - they have a high-end laptop that would retail without the 3D screen for about 1.8k (I've checked on the net) with the 3D screen for 2k!! They also have a 15" monitor for 325+VAT. I'd say that's a tad small, I always use 19"+ screens for the PC, but they're only 1,600!
The biggest problem seems to be supply. The company doing the demo has a good supply chain, but getting them anywhere else is hard - the manufacturers are happy to provide the specs, etc but unless you want to by the units in their thousands, they simply don't make them. Once it's more mainstream, they'll be albe to make them for a few pence more each (it's only an extra layer of glass on the front), but for now they have to make them in a prototype manner so they make batches up on request for retail suppliers.
Even so they still seem really cheap!
Not sure a 3d tv would work so well with most modern games, considering most engines have heavy "visibility" optimisations which would look odd from any angle other than the one its supposed to be rendering from..
Neat idea though, i just doubt it's backwards compatible
Neat idea though, i just doubt it's backwards compatible
Edited by scorp on Thursday 11th January 10:04
Please give us the nerdy details, on the forum! Presumably it's not 3d in that you can move your head and the image moves - you see the same thing wherever you are?
I would be very interested. I can't believe they're that cheap!? What sort of signal do they take? Is it an analogue or digital connection?
I bought some LCD-Shutter 3D glasses 3 years ago which work with any Geforce card (nVidia still do the drivers and everything) for £25. These work by constantly showing you an alternating 'left eye' image then a 'right eye' image, simultaneously covering the opposite eye each time. The effect is proper 3D and looked incredible. Worked with perhaps 60% of games via DirectX, some had bugs, others no 3D at all. Games did not have to have support so I disagree with the previous poster who said it would be unlikely to work with modern games. I think DirectX handles the 3d 'world', and the 3d drivers just tell DirectX to render 2 images, one with the viewpoint slightly to the left, then another with the viewpoint slightly to the right, then the drivers alternate them.
Clever stuff and I'm looking forward to 3d tv becoming mainstream one day!
I would be very interested. I can't believe they're that cheap!? What sort of signal do they take? Is it an analogue or digital connection?
I bought some LCD-Shutter 3D glasses 3 years ago which work with any Geforce card (nVidia still do the drivers and everything) for £25. These work by constantly showing you an alternating 'left eye' image then a 'right eye' image, simultaneously covering the opposite eye each time. The effect is proper 3D and looked incredible. Worked with perhaps 60% of games via DirectX, some had bugs, others no 3D at all. Games did not have to have support so I disagree with the previous poster who said it would be unlikely to work with modern games. I think DirectX handles the 3d 'world', and the 3d drivers just tell DirectX to render 2 images, one with the viewpoint slightly to the left, then another with the viewpoint slightly to the right, then the drivers alternate them.
Clever stuff and I'm looking forward to 3d tv becoming mainstream one day!
Gah, I worte a long message and it was wipped when an email took me to another URL 
I'll start again as I love to wax-lyrical about these things...
You can walk around the display and still see the 3D, but there is one sweet spot and several 'zones', but in between them it looks a bit odd and not quite right - like looking at a red-blue 3D picture without the glasses on. However you can easily have 5 people looking at the same display and seeing the same 3D scene.
There are two system in use today. One is called Parallax and the other Lenticular. Both have pros and cons.
Parallax works with a screen in front of the normal display. It's basically a black screen with hols in. The black bits are an LCD layer (like in calculators) that can be black or clear. When it's clear it's a normal 2D display, when it's black you filter what goes to the left and the right eyes. If it's still a 2D image then it's still 2D. If the image to diaply has been encoded for the screen, then you left eye and right eye see 2 images that make the 3D scene. It also works by splicing 8 images so you can see a bit around the objects. In theory you could ramp up the resolution and dot density and encode 180 views and you could see different views of the same object so as you move around the display you see around the object.
The encoding needs to be done before the TV and can work in real time with the 8 video streams playing out. I'm not sure if you could do 180 in real time today though (or even 360 compressed into 180). BUT a normal TV feed will carry all the data you need for the 3D image (if it's encoded).
Lenticular display devices have virtical prism lenses in front of the display. They work like those things you get in cereal boxes with Tony the Tiger saying 'Greeeeat' in 3D. The Tvs are more sophisticated but the same idea. They are brighter than Parallax screen as they don't have the black bits blocking the light out and they seem to work a bit better, though that may be bause I saw a 50" Parallax, a 47" and a 21" Lenticular, so the information density was higher with the Lenticular devices. The Phillips Lenticular systems also has a limitation that it takes a single image and a depth map to produce the 3D scene. This means that you can't look around the object and it causes artifacts where a near object interfaces with a far object and causes smearing of the visual aspect of the far image where the software trys to fill in the missing data of what's behind the near object. The displays also have more trouble showing 2D images as you can't 'turn off' the lenses, but it can be done.
The signal it receives is also a normal TV stream, but in this case it's the image appended with the grey scale depth map. This means computer games just have to stick the depth map buffer into the end of the image stream. So Direct X 3D apps should be easy, and OpenGL not that hard, though it may require a special version of the OpenGL engine. The graphics card drivers could also do this for the displays.
Both systems work really well and I'm looking at getting the laptop from them (uses Parallax) - but I need to buy house stuff, car stuff, holidays and special jewellery first, so I may have to get it through work
I have a couple of business ideas too, but I need to do more work on them before I say anything out loud as it were.
Really good for Architects can CAD, medical etc too as the visualisation is much better than a flat screen.
ETA - the 3D res is about 1/3 of the horizontal res of the 2D display, which is why the 21" HD screen looked sooo good
I'll start again as I love to wax-lyrical about these things...
You can walk around the display and still see the 3D, but there is one sweet spot and several 'zones', but in between them it looks a bit odd and not quite right - like looking at a red-blue 3D picture without the glasses on. However you can easily have 5 people looking at the same display and seeing the same 3D scene.
There are two system in use today. One is called Parallax and the other Lenticular. Both have pros and cons.
Parallax works with a screen in front of the normal display. It's basically a black screen with hols in. The black bits are an LCD layer (like in calculators) that can be black or clear. When it's clear it's a normal 2D display, when it's black you filter what goes to the left and the right eyes. If it's still a 2D image then it's still 2D. If the image to diaply has been encoded for the screen, then you left eye and right eye see 2 images that make the 3D scene. It also works by splicing 8 images so you can see a bit around the objects. In theory you could ramp up the resolution and dot density and encode 180 views and you could see different views of the same object so as you move around the display you see around the object.
The encoding needs to be done before the TV and can work in real time with the 8 video streams playing out. I'm not sure if you could do 180 in real time today though (or even 360 compressed into 180
). BUT a normal TV feed will carry all the data you need for the 3D image (if it's encoded). Lenticular display devices have virtical prism lenses in front of the display. They work like those things you get in cereal boxes with Tony the Tiger saying 'Greeeeat' in 3D. The Tvs are more sophisticated but the same idea. They are brighter than Parallax screen as they don't have the black bits blocking the light out and they seem to work a bit better, though that may be bause I saw a 50" Parallax, a 47" and a 21" Lenticular, so the information density was higher with the Lenticular devices. The Phillips Lenticular systems also has a limitation that it takes a single image and a depth map to produce the 3D scene. This means that you can't look around the object and it causes artifacts where a near object interfaces with a far object and causes smearing of the visual aspect of the far image where the software trys to fill in the missing data of what's behind the near object. The displays also have more trouble showing 2D images as you can't 'turn off' the lenses, but it can be done.
The signal it receives is also a normal TV stream, but in this case it's the image appended with the grey scale depth map. This means computer games just have to stick the depth map buffer into the end of the image stream. So Direct X 3D apps should be easy, and OpenGL not that hard, though it may require a special version of the OpenGL engine. The graphics card drivers could also do this for the displays.
Both systems work really well and I'm looking at getting the laptop from them (uses Parallax) - but I need to buy house stuff, car stuff, holidays and special jewellery first, so I may have to get it through work
I have a couple of business ideas too, but I need to do more work on them before I say anything out loud as it were.
Really good for Architects can CAD, medical etc too as the visualisation is much better than a flat screen.
ETA - the 3D res is about 1/3 of the horizontal res of the 2D display, which is why the 21" HD screen looked sooo good
Edited by MTv Dave on Thursday 11th January 14:46
In the meantime, how is the world on 3d glasses at the moment? I mean ones with 2 screens, one for the left eye and one for the right eye? I remember a Ford Galaxy demonstrator at the motorshow which had these, plus it tracked your head so you could look around you... and had a thing you held in your hand to push bottons in the 3d world.. true VR!!
pentoman said:
In the meantime, how is the world on 3d glasses at the moment? I mean ones with 2 screens, one for the left eye and one for the right eye? I remember a Ford Galaxy demonstrator at the motorshow which had these, plus it tracked your head so you could look around you... and had a thing you held in your hand to push bottons in the 3d world.. true VR!!
They're very small these days. I had a quick play yesterday. I wore a pair of what looked like Wire Oakley glasses, they have some good kit in - like the Wii controllers, to track your head movement, but not your eyes (though they had those there too, but I didn't play). They were a little delicate, but they were 1600x1200 per eye running off a duel head graphics card with DVI connection. The signal was sent to a base station and the glasses themselves were wireless - not sure how long you could run them for though. These things cost 12 grand a pair, but thinking of the amount of high tech stuff going into them, it was a reasonable price (but far too high for me).
pentoman said:
Please give us the nerdy details, on the forum! Presumably it's not 3d in that you can move your head and the image moves - you see the same thing wherever you are?
I would be very interested. I can't believe they're that cheap!? What sort of signal do they take? Is it an analogue or digital connection?
I bought some LCD-Shutter 3D glasses 3 years ago which work with any Geforce card (nVidia still do the drivers and everything) for £25. These work by constantly showing you an alternating 'left eye' image then a 'right eye' image, simultaneously covering the opposite eye each time. The effect is proper 3D and looked incredible. Worked with perhaps 60% of games via DirectX, some had bugs, others no 3D at all. Games did not have to have support so I disagree with the previous poster who said it would be unlikely to work with modern games. I think DirectX handles the 3d 'world', and the 3d drivers just tell DirectX to render 2 images, one with the viewpoint slightly to the left, then another with the viewpoint slightly to the right, then the drivers alternate them.
Clever stuff and I'm looking forward to 3d tv becoming mainstream one day!
I would be very interested. I can't believe they're that cheap!? What sort of signal do they take? Is it an analogue or digital connection?
I bought some LCD-Shutter 3D glasses 3 years ago which work with any Geforce card (nVidia still do the drivers and everything) for £25. These work by constantly showing you an alternating 'left eye' image then a 'right eye' image, simultaneously covering the opposite eye each time. The effect is proper 3D and looked incredible. Worked with perhaps 60% of games via DirectX, some had bugs, others no 3D at all. Games did not have to have support so I disagree with the previous poster who said it would be unlikely to work with modern games. I think DirectX handles the 3d 'world', and the 3d drivers just tell DirectX to render 2 images, one with the viewpoint slightly to the left, then another with the viewpoint slightly to the right, then the drivers alternate them.
Clever stuff and I'm looking forward to 3d tv becoming mainstream one day!
A truly 3d display (e.g. like a starwars holographic one) will be incompatible with most 3d games, this is because the almost all 3d engines are optimised to render from the cameras viewpoint and polygons that are hidden from that viewpoint will not be rendered (or sent to directx).
Reading the post properly, seems to suggest a stereoscopic display, which wasn't what i was thinking, so i appologise for my bad assumption, i wold guess a good percentage of games would work with that...
Edited by scorp on Thursday 11th January 15:08
I had a eurika moment earlier to make a starwars-esc system, but more like a crystal ball - two lasers (well 6 for a colour version) under a small projector screen (one for each side of the screen, acting in mirror to each other)). Spin the assembly around the verticle center-line axis of the screen and use the lasers to trace the outline of the object onto the screen as it spins, each degree (or smaller probably) of roation draw the outline for that angle. The combined effect would be to draw the shell of the object through the sweep of the screen.
Then I found out there already is one some movies of it in action...
www.inition.co.uk/inition/VIDEO/stereovis_actuality_mathgraph.mov
www.inition.co.uk/inition/VIDEO/stereovis_actuality_military.mov
www.inition.co.uk/inition/VIDEO/stereovis_actuality_sugarmolecule.mov
Not sure how well it would deal with a moving scene though?
Then I found out there already is one
some movies of it in action... www.inition.co.uk/inition/VIDEO/stereovis_actuality_mathgraph.mov
www.inition.co.uk/inition/VIDEO/stereovis_actuality_military.mov
www.inition.co.uk/inition/VIDEO/stereovis_actuality_sugarmolecule.mov
Not sure how well it would deal with a moving scene though?
Jaglover said:
I tried 3D at the IMAX and it made me feel sick. If that is a common reaction then that is an extra hurdle for 3D Tvs to overcome.
I've wondered the same myself, imagine watching a horror movie or something in totally immersive 3d, i'd imagine it'd screw you up mentally
scorp said:
I've wondered the same myself, imagine watching a horror movie or something in totally immersive 3d, i'd imagine it'd screw you up mentally
Yeah, but then you could say that with the switch to colour - it may have been too realistic and immersive when it came out and people would have stuck with black and white, or radio, or story books (which I think are the worst) I've got to say that I expected a lot more people to be interested. PH is mostly filled with people that have reasonable wealth and an interest in gadgetry. These things are pretty bleeding edge (in terms of main stream gadgets) and not so expensive they are millionaire's toys...
Edit for :P to
Edited by MTv Dave on Friday 12th January 14:09
yeah but the computer forums here are only inhabited by geeks!
You could prove it by starting a 'fittest bird' thread in 'computers and stuff'. Most popular would probably be Alysson Hannigan (willow from Buffy), followed by Lisa Rogers (her from Scrapyard Challenge, currently sporting bongo juggers to accompany her pregnancy).
Sorry went off thread a bit there..
You could prove it by starting a 'fittest bird' thread in 'computers and stuff'. Most popular would probably be Alysson Hannigan (willow from Buffy), followed by Lisa Rogers (her from Scrapyard Challenge, currently sporting bongo juggers to accompany her pregnancy).
Sorry went off thread a bit there..
pentoman said:
yeah but the computer forums here are only inhabited by geeks!
You could prove it by starting a 'fittest bird' thread in 'computers and stuff'. Most popular would probably be Alysson Hannigan (willow from Buffy), followed by Lisa Rogers (her from Scrapyard Challenge, currently sporting bongo juggers to accompany her pregnancy).
Sorry went off thread a bit there..
You could prove it by starting a 'fittest bird' thread in 'computers and stuff'. Most popular would probably be Alysson Hannigan (willow from Buffy), followed by Lisa Rogers (her from Scrapyard Challenge, currently sporting bongo juggers to accompany her pregnancy).
Sorry went off thread a bit there..
pentoman said:
yeah but the computer forums here are only inhabited by geeks!
You could prove it by starting a 'fittest bird' thread in 'computers and stuff'. Most popular would probably be Alysson Hannigan (willow from Buffy), followed by Lisa Rogers (her from Scrapyard Challenge, currently sporting bongo juggers to accompany her pregnancy).
Sorry went off thread a bit there..
You could prove it by starting a 'fittest bird' thread in 'computers and stuff'. Most popular would probably be Alysson Hannigan (willow from Buffy), followed by Lisa Rogers (her from Scrapyard Challenge, currently sporting bongo juggers to accompany her pregnancy).
Sorry went off thread a bit there..
Nothing wrong with that. 
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