Give Me 3D TV, Without The Glasses
1. 3D Monitors, No Glasses Required
We’d dig 3DTV if it weren’t for those annoying glasses. But there’s hope: we found several companies at CES who are trying to get rid of them.
You can’t spit on the CES convention floor without hitting a 3D HDTV. To some, this is cause for excitement. For me, it is cause for Advil. Watching a 3D movie or television set isn’t pleasant due to the glasses required to see the stereoscopic image. I know I’m not the only one who finds the experience uncomfortable.
But discomfort—headaches, eyestrain, nausea—isn’t the only problem with 3D glasses. If we all had 3D TVs in our homes, how many glasses would we buy? Six? And what if one day there were seven people in your living room? What if you lost a pair? 3D glasses are inconvenient at best, and disruptive at worst.
Before attending CES, I knew there had to be another way. Turns out, there are several ways. This week, I sought out companies who are attempting to bypass the 3D glasses issue with a variety of technologies, each usually referred to as “auto-stereoscopic.”. None of them are perfect, and nearly none of them are available commercially—but they all hold promise. I, for one, hope the marketplace adopts a non-glasses approach to 3DTV. More on CES 2010
Not many manufacturers are yet investing in the no-glasses 3D system, and all of them are very hard to find on the show floor. In fact, we never did find two manufacturers who were supposed to be present. The first is Magnetic 3D, which makes monitors ranging from 22 to 42 inches that could be used for gaming (this line is called the Emersa series). The second is NEC, which is working on a 12.1-inch auto-stereoscopic 3D display for the Japanese market, and also will make displays as small as 3.1 inches. In general, most of the companies looking to enter the non-glasses 3D market are first approaching it from the retail and commercial perspective: screens that show advertising in public spaces, rather than in products designed for the home market.
The first no-glasses-required set we actually managed to spot on the show floor is made by a Chinese company called TCL. A loop of animated 3D cartoons played over a honeycomb of 3D sets. The 42-inch TD-42F is already on the market in China, says TCL 3DTV Project Marketing Manager King (no last name). It sells for about $20,000. It works like this: there are actually eight lenses on the screen itself. Depending on where you stand in relation to the TV, you see only a few of those perspectives. This “lenticular” system is popular in all the 3D systems with no glasses that we saw. TCL’s TV set only displayed animation on the show floor. Looking at live-action would’ve been a better test of the set’s potential for eventual home use. The 3D aspect of the screen did not “pop” forward as much as, say, the flying fictional beasts in the showing of Avatar I saw last weekend. The up-in-frontness of it was much more subtle here.
Next, I checked out a prototype at Samsung’s booth. The 50-inch display has a very wide viewing angle, and I could see 3D cartoons no matter where I stood in front of it (again, no live action footage). The images on screen looked very similar to those on the TCL set. Personally, I don’t see a downside to a 3D world where bullets don’t look like they’re two inches from your nose—those kinds of special effects are cheesy, anyway. I want 3D images to enhance my experience, not distract me with flashy flying objects that make me gasp. Samsung’s prototype is made for commercial use, and the company has not announced plans to make this prototype into a product for home use.
2. Live Action 3D Without Glasses
We’d dig 3DTV if it weren’t for those annoying glasses. But there’s hope: we found several companies at CES who are trying to get rid of them.
The last 3D television set we saw was in a private demonstration off the show floor. 3D Eye Solutions’ CEO Mike Gibilisco walked me through his company’s take on glasses-less 3DTV. The display he used is not his company’s—it is a 3D set made by Philips with a similar lenticular lens coating as the Samsung and TCL screens we saw (Gibilisco said this screen had 9 viewpoints instead of 8). In fact, according to him, Samsung’s screen was actually manufactured by Philips as well, and rebranded for the show floor. I’ll check with Samsung for confirmation.
3D Eye Solutions doesn’t make the display, but it does make the system that puts the content on the TV, as well as turns 2D content into 3D. He played bits from various live action movies, including Iron Man and Wanted. He also played animation in the form of video games: a flight simulator and a Katamari-style game. The live action footage had been converted to 3D before hand. The games were converted to 3D on the fly by a processor/set-top box the company uses to display its footage. While the games looked slightly blurry to my eye, the live action clips looked stunning. I took pictures, but, naturally, they don’t do the effect justice. 3D Eye solutions works with movie studios to convert their existing catalog of films into 3D. Eventually, the 3D Eye Solutions system could convert live TV broadcasts into 3D on the fly.
The company is first targeting the commercial market as well—monitors in the Las Vegas Hilton Resort featured 3D Eye Solutions’ 3D clips this week. The company hopes to get movie trailers for 3D movies as advertising inventory—perhaps, then, consumers will ask why it is they can see a trailer without glasses, but not the entire movie. If all goes well, this consumer demand will drive movie makers and distributors to ditch glasses in favor of auto-stereoscopic “upconverted-to-3D” films post-produced by 3D Eye Solutions. Then, those movies will show up on media players in living rooms, with tech built into the set-top box (and lenticular lenses built into the TV screen). Nobody would buy cheap, uncomfortable 3D glasses again. I’d sure like to see this happen, thought is still a long way off.
3. Make Your Own 3D
We’d dig 3DTV if it weren’t for those annoying glasses. But there’s hope: we found several companies at CES who are trying to get rid of them.
But what about home video and photography? When will that show up in 3D? Fujifilm is on the task. At CES, the company showed off a point-and-shoot camera called the FinePix REAL 3D W1—it has two lenses, two sensors, and takes two shots every time you take a picture. The camera merges the left and right images into a single image. The 3D image can be viewed on the display on the backside of the camera, but it can also be loaded from the camera’s SD card onto an 8-inch monitor from Fujifilm. The camera sells for $600, and the monitor for another $400 (that is, if you can find them. They’re supposed to be available for purchase in the U.S. but I only found them on Japanese import sites).
The monitor, as well as the display on the back of the camera, operate under the same principals as the 3D TVs—they’re coated in lenticular lenses. If you’re wondering what this stuff looks like, it’s the same textured, plasticky stuff that sometimes came on a small collectible card in your cereal box as a kid. If you ever had a toy that displayed one image when held at one angle, and another image at another angle, then you know what I’m talking about. The lenticular lenses on the products I saw we’re merely more evolved versions of that same textured plastic paper.
Speaking of paper, Fujifilm also sells consumers prints of the 3D images they took with their FinePix Real 3D W1. Guess what? These come back to you in the mail coated on, what else, lenticular lens paper!
I got to test out the camera and monitor, as you can see in these not-so-great pictures. It doesn’t translate well via these images, but the 3D images displayed on the back of the camera and the monitor were the best 3D images we saw at CES. I think it has something to do with the tiny screen size. The edges of objects popped right off the screen. I wasn’t able to record any video, but the demonstration videos FujiFilm showed were clear and sharp.
Granted, it is tough to imagine someone loving the look of a tiny 3D family picture so much that he purchases a $600 camera just so he can stare at the back of the camera all day. Fujifilm recognizes this—and in many ways, the product is merely a representation of what the company could do once it is convinced that auto-stereoscopic 3D is here to stay. If I haven’t made it clear already—I hope the consumer electronics industry shifts away from glasses and towards lenticular lenses on screens. The technology needs a bit of work, but it will be worth it in a few years so we can avoid the in-between and inconvenient step of 3D glasses.
source: http://www.tomsguide.com/us/3DTV-autostereoscopic-CES,review-1490.html
