04:31
Mr. Asim Rajput
CES 2011 was billed as the year of 3D, but this year's show also had dozens of offerings, lots of of which sound similar on paper. Here, ExtremeTech checks out the most fascinating prospects for no-glasses 3D in 2012 & beyond.
Stream TV's Ultra-D: Wide-viewing-angle 3D without glasses
After the rush to upgrade to HDTV, 3D was supposed to be the next giant thing. Propelled by the enthusiasm for a few well-crafted media properties like the blockbuster film Avatar, preliminary expectations were set high. But cost, a lack of compelling content, potential health issues, & the necessity for annoying & pricey glasses have kept 3D TV from getting far. Now, several firms are trying to break through by getting rid of those pesky glasses, offering glasses-free 3D experiences, while others are upping the ante by providing a premium experience with cheap polarized glasses or even new version of pricey, but now wireless, active glasses.
Until now, the most common way to accomplish 3D viewing without glasses has been with specially designed displays using what is called a parallax barrier where any viewer to the left of the display's middle sees the picture recorded by the left camera (& meant for the left eye) & any viewer to the right sees the right-side picture (meant for the right eye). As you can imagine, this only works if the person viewing the screen sits exactly where the parallax barrier is set up to divide the picture. As a result, it works well for personal display screens like the on the Fujifilm & Panasonic 3D cameras, & the LG Thrill & HTC Evo 3D smartphones, which permit capturing & viewing 3D. But a parallax barrier doesn't work well when you have over person in the audience, or in the event you require to move around at all while watching the media since it only performs properly if the viewer is directly in front of the direction for which the barrier is tuned.
The Ultra-D method requires a small bit of heavy lifting on the hardware and program side. Existing LCD, LED and OLED panels can be used, but an additional microlens layer is necessary for the displays, as well as new firmware and program. StreamTV is aggressively licensing its platform to makers of TVs, tablets, and smartphones, with the promise of 42-inch and 55-inch LED TVs available in retail by this summer. The Ultra-D TVs will be bundled with Stream TV's SeeCube, which allows the realtime conversion of 2D to 3D and of traditional 3D content designed for use with glasses in to autostereoscopic content for display on an Ultra-D gizmo. Tablets and digital picture frames are also on tap, although details haven't been disclosed.
Several companies are using this year's CES to launch new solutions for multi-viewer 3D without glasses. StreamTV, best known for the Elocity tablet, rolled out an impressive platform called Ultra-D, which allows not autostereoscopic (without glasses) viewing of existing 3D content, but realtime conversion of conventional 2D images and video in to its 3D format. On paper Ultra-D slices through the major bottlenecks hampering 3D very nicely. By having displays that are autostereoscopic no glasses are necessary, and by allowing realtime conversion to 3D, suddenly a near boundless amount of content is available.
StreamTV is tight-lipped about how the method actually works, but from watching a variety of their prototypes and speaking to some of their researchers, it turns out that in lieu of the traditional glasses-free solution of having images for the left eye and for the right then showing to each eye Ultra-D creates 9 different images, each with a matchless angle on the scene. The specially built display has an array of microlenses in front of the conventional LCD that project each picture out in a series of overlapping cones. As a result each eye sees a combination of as plenty of as four different images all with a slightly different point of view and is responsible for integrating the total in to a coherent picture. Since your eyes are a few inches apart, at most viewing positions your left eye sees a different set of four images than your right eye (in essence your right eye is moved over by, so if your left eye sees picture two, three, four, five, for example, your right eye might see images three, four, five, and 6). This clever approach means that as you move around the viewing area, the picture you see actually changes.
Several companies are using this year's CES to launch new solutions for multi-viewer 3D without glasses. StreamTV, best known for the Elocity tablet, rolled out an impressive platform called Ultra-D, which allows not autostereoscopic (without glasses) viewing of existing 3D content, but realtime conversion of conventional 2D images and video in to its 3D format. On paper Ultra-D slices through the major bottlenecks hampering 3D very nicely. By having displays that are autostereoscopic no glasses are necessary, and by allowing realtime conversion to 3D, suddenly a near boundless amount of content is available.
StreamTV is tight-lipped about how the method actually works, but from watching a variety of their prototypes and speaking to some of their researchers, it turns out that in lieu of the traditional glasses-free solution of having images for the left eye and for the right then showing to each eye Ultra-D creates 9 different images, each with a matchless angle on the scene. The specially built display has an array of microlenses in front of the conventional LCD that project each picture out in a series of overlapping cones. As a result each eye sees a combination of as plenty of as four different images all with a slightly different point of view and is responsible for integrating the total in to a coherent picture. Since your eyes are a few inches apart, at most viewing positions your left eye sees a different set of four images than your right eye (in essence your right eye is moved over by, so if your left eye sees picture two, three, four, five, for example, your right eye might see images three, four, five, and 6). This clever approach means that as you move around the viewing area, the picture you see actually changes.
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