Maybe I'll have again one day a 3D TV set... even though I didn't like much the glasses, I really miss watching 3D movies at home. And this one promises 3D without glasses!
I somewhat miss the novelty of the 3d camera+screen on my old HTC android phone. It's a fun nice-to-have but there wasn't enough media that worked with it except what you recorded, which also wasn't the best thing to watch in 3D :)
That's always an issue with new media tech. The same chicken and egg thing existed when 720 and later 1080+ TVs were released, there was practically nothing to watch on them at first. I think 3D has more issues to deal with than 3D but if there's TVs out there in large numbers the media will probably follow.
I'm 98% sure they stopped making 3d tvs, so you can't find a 2019-2021 3d tv; although I think some current model projectors might be capable.
I don't think there were enough sales to encourage enough media production to encourage sustainable sales to encourage continued display manufacturing. I'm biased because I wear glasses and wearing two sets of glasses is a negative experience anyway. The many different incompatible glasses made it unlikely to find prescription lenses with the right filters to make it possible to wear a single pair to see the screen and get stereo vision, so I was always going to hate it.
Yeah 3D is a bit different than the strict resolution increase because it isn't just an upgrade to the cameras it changes how things are filmed and framed (look at every 3d movie it always has the obvious "ooooh it's coming out of the screen" shot you can pick out even in 2D).
There was enough 3D content (aka movies) for me to watch in weekends. No need for the news to be in 3D. And I was using the polarized glasses which were pretty fine for a relaxing (and low expectations) evening.
I actually enjoyed Avatar in 3d at home. My wife? Not so much. As a family we may have watched it that way twice. Since then, the 3d glasses have sat in a drawer.
My senior year of high-school I made a similar display. I purchased a lenticular screen, coated it, and modified a projector to make a much smaller image than intended. Alignment was tough, but I ended up with about 4" of useful horizontal space with a fairly narrow viewing angle.
There really isn't any magic, it's just a lot of pixels to push. I was able to do a Utah Teapot to 2 views at 400x600 on a 100MHz 486 (it was an 800x600 projector).
The 3d input is transformed into a series of 45 views. At any point you're looking at on the screen, you're seeing one of those views with your left eye, and a different view with your right eye. The optics to do this kind of thing have been around for a while in one dimension. They seem to have a much higher resolution display with all these tiles in it, multiplexed, and driven by a custom display processor.
I expect the price to stay high, and this not to become a consumer purchase.
I don't understand these units. It says the display is "7680px x 4320px". Shouldn't there be a third dimension? Or is it displaying 2D images with a depth indicator (i.e. no pixel can be directly in front of another pixel)?
It says No. of Views: 42-100, but it uses 2 display ports each capable of 7680x4320, which suggests it takes just two images and interpolates between them.
I think it works like a lenticular - the 3d only works horizontally (because our eyes are on that plane). So the 7680 pixel resolution is divided into pixels being sent in a variety of directions to create the depth.
We have one at work and it’s quite cool. But also quite small even though we have what was previously the large one.
There is some sort of film on top of the display that allows "selecting" pixels based on viewing angle. This is not unlike those 3D postcards that were a fad some time ago, or the Nintendo 3DS, only a much more sophisticated version of that.
The 3DS is really neat. It does do the postcard thing ("parallax barrier"), but only to make sure each eye gets a separate image. It then uses face tracking to get a much more accurate idea of exactly where the eyes are and renders the image with that in mind, so slightly moving or turning your head adjusts the image appropriately.
There aren't voxels, so you can't represent the depth in a simple quantized way. You can use VR for a similar example. Each eye gets its own perspective as an image at some resolution. 3d comes from your eyes relating the pixels in each image. Sure, there's a minimum angular resolution for each pixel, so there's a minimum resolving power for the depth, but you the end up with a bunch of rays rather than bounded boxes, with the resolution depending on things like the convergence of your eyes.
This case is similar, with how close you are also affecting things.
the format it uses to display still images. The 8K version is 5 by 9 for 45 separate angles, giving a 3D resolution of 864x864x45(horizontal). As somebody else said, it's not really a voxel because the 3d effect is technically a trick and doesn't work on other axes.
If you think 864p seems low for a 32" display, that's because it is - I've seen these in person and they have terrible pixel density. They're still very cool, though. 3D without glasses or a headset is impressive.
Those single person "holograms" aren't 3d. They offer a perspective shift that tracks a single point on your head, and look great in video, or with one eye closed, but are 2d when viewed with the eyes. For 3d, you need to give each eye a different perspective.
These holograms are 3d, since each eye is presented with an image that matches its own perspective.
Only for one person though which isn't a great thing for TVs which generally have more than one person watching. Also the tracking is a bit of an issue, you'd have to wear a little headset to accurately track your head when they were released. Now you could maybe get away with using a camera for tracking but now you've got the privacy worries of that happening.
As I understand it, this isn't a true holograph; it's just a very convincing imitation by rendering the image from two perspectives every few degrees and displays it on a high-res display that pipes it through a prism to use refraction to create an optical illusion trick.
The marketing isn't very clear about that. Still very cool product, tho.
Wouldn't it be great to get real holographic interfaces and displays? Not things that are only called "holographic".
To be fair, I do like 3d displays and interfaces but I really don't like the indiscriminate use of the term "holographic". Those that have seen real synthetic holograms will know how amazing they can look.
I got to play with a dev kit IRL and they are super impressive up close. The images have real depth and the development environment is standard Unity with just an HDMI out to the display. That being said, the usable field of view is not 180, it's narrower than that. And after building a few nifty demos, we put it on a shelf and never figured out a way to make it useful or interesting.
I played with the great grandfather of this device — a black & white ~4” LCD, the size of a pizza box, attached to a 286 luggable. It was cool … but the killer feature is being able to rotate the data — our eyes are still 2D.
Turns out, I can rotate data on a regular old monitor.
If there was a version with 180° FOV, on a table, it’d be a great gaming table, but the market is … niche?
Pedantic correction: our eyes are not "2d", depth perception is a thing. That's why VR hardware is still years/decades away from replicating the real thing. More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depth_perception
The biggest component that VR doesn't have is a way of simulating focal distances. Current VR headsets focus at a fixed distance of about 2 meters, which makes reading and examining close objects difficult and causes distant ones to appear flat and unreal. The world lacks part of what lets us see depth. Facebook has very impressive prototypes that solve this [0], but so far they've been unwilling or unable to manufacture them at scale.
VR headsets are also severely lacking in brightness and color depth compared to reality or even modern TVs, and they could always use more angular resolution, wider viewing angles, and higher refresh rates.
I'm not sure how this is adding anything to the conversation. My grandmother cannot tell the difference between SD and HDTV, let alone 4K/UHD, yet the difference is quite drastic to me and a higher resolution is certainly more realistic and immersive. Maintaining a visual experience that is as close to reality as possible is what sells the illusion. That's great that the bar is lower for you I guess, but not really helpful for literally the majority of the world.
There are a lot of optics nerds in the world who will insist that the current state of VR is Broken Beyond Redemption because of their pet vision feature they learned about in intro to biology. It's not. Yes, it's not perfect, but it's still better than a 2D screen.
I realize that this 2D video is not showing exactly what you'd see with this special interface, but it does feature panning scenes where objects show 3D relief – presumably as a way to simulate the 3D effect that this device is capable of.
On a large high-resolution screen this looks blurry and low-res, not really a great demo for an 8K display.
It is blurry and low-res, it's 8K across 45 different views that it renders simultaneously. There is an 8K screen in there, but when you look at it you will only see ~850p at a time.
Wasn't the dream of holographic displays to get rid of screens? I mean, granted, that's sci-fi, but the marginal improvement of depth inside a screen seems minimal at best?
Linus Tech Tips covered them before that gives a pretty good overview [0]. It's a really cool tech and I hope it becomes more affordable in the future. I'd imagine actually feeling like a person is physically present will make Zoom meetings and such a lot less boring.
The small one is $300 with shipping estimate in October. Early Kickstarter pledges have shipped but still working on the rest of them. My batch is currently scheduled for next month.
Autostereoscopic, not holographic. That alone is enough for me to not buy it because its being dishonest at best.
“Holographic-like experience” would be an order of magnitude more accurate. Now you have a very constrained viewing window, limited depth without fuzzing, especially in front of the display. On the plus side, you get animations, proper colors and interaction. Wish dimenco were still selling their WOWvx displays on 8k and not the current costly integrated kit. 8k allows much better angular resolution, but nothing remotely close to an hologram.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 122 ms ] threadI don't think there were enough sales to encourage enough media production to encourage sustainable sales to encourage continued display manufacturing. I'm biased because I wear glasses and wearing two sets of glasses is a negative experience anyway. The many different incompatible glasses made it unlikely to find prescription lenses with the right filters to make it possible to wear a single pair to see the screen and get stereo vision, so I was always going to hate it.
Making a lenticular film that small is tough but not rocket science. The software is doing most of the magic interlacing the images properly.
There really isn't any magic, it's just a lot of pixels to push. I was able to do a Utah Teapot to 2 views at 400x600 on a 100MHz 486 (it was an 800x600 projector).
I expect the price to stay high, and this not to become a consumer purchase.
We have one at work and it’s quite cool. But also quite small even though we have what was previously the large one.
This case is similar, with how close you are also affecting things.
https://docs.lookingglassfactory.com/keyconcepts/quilts
the format it uses to display still images. The 8K version is 5 by 9 for 45 separate angles, giving a 3D resolution of 864x864x45(horizontal). As somebody else said, it's not really a voxel because the 3d effect is technically a trick and doesn't work on other axes.
If you think 864p seems low for a 32" display, that's because it is - I've seen these in person and they have terrible pixel density. They're still very cool, though. 3D without glasses or a headset is impressive.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw
These holograms are 3d, since each eye is presented with an image that matches its own perspective.
The marketing isn't very clear about that. Still very cool product, tho.
That’s an understatement. It’s deceptive and underhanded.
To be fair, I do like 3d displays and interfaces but I really don't like the indiscriminate use of the term "holographic". Those that have seen real synthetic holograms will know how amazing they can look.
Turns out, I can rotate data on a regular old monitor.
If there was a version with 180° FOV, on a table, it’d be a great gaming table, but the market is … niche?
VR headsets are also severely lacking in brightness and color depth compared to reality or even modern TVs, and they could always use more angular resolution, wider viewing angles, and higher refresh rates.
[0] https://uploadvr.com/half-dome-3-prime-time/
Is no different than the vision problems most people over 50 have. In fact, I dont need my progressive lenses to read up close in VR.
Are variable focal length eyeballs part of experiencing the 3d world? Yes. Can we live without it? Yes, and you will too some day.
I realize that this 2D video is not showing exactly what you'd see with this special interface, but it does feature panning scenes where objects show 3D relief – presumably as a way to simulate the 3D effect that this device is capable of.
On a large high-resolution screen this looks blurry and low-res, not really a great demo for an 8K display.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EA2FQXs4dw
https://lookingglassfactory.com/portrait/
“Holographic-like experience” would be an order of magnitude more accurate. Now you have a very constrained viewing window, limited depth without fuzzing, especially in front of the display. On the plus side, you get animations, proper colors and interaction. Wish dimenco were still selling their WOWvx displays on 8k and not the current costly integrated kit. 8k allows much better angular resolution, but nothing remotely close to an hologram.