3D Equipment

3D Gaming Leaders Gather At OCE’s Discovery 11

Featuring top representation from Sony, AMD, Nvidia, Dynamic Digital Depth, Autodesk, Big Blue Bubble and more, The S-3D Gaming Alliance is pleased to announce the 3D gaming panel and presentations taking place at the upcoming Discovery 11 conference. Held at the Metro Toronto Convention Center on May 18th and 19th, OCE’s Discovery was named as Canada’s Best Trade Show and is the country’s leading innovation-to-commercialization conference. Hosted by Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE), Discovery 11 brings together key players from industry, academia, government, the investment community as well as entrepreneurs and students to pursue collaboration opportunities. Read more…

MIT: New Approach To Glasses-Free 3D Technology

Researchers at MIT’s Media Lab announced on Wednesday that they have developed a new approach to glasses-free 3D technology.

The team said they could double the battery life of devices like Nintendo’s 3DS portable gaming system without compromising screen brightness or resolution.

The researchers also said that their technique would expand the viewing angle of a 3D screen.

According to Doug Lanman, a postdoc in Associate Professor Ramesh Raskar’s Camera Culture Group at the Media Lab, Nintendo’s 3DS relies on an older technology known as parallax barrier.  This requires two versions of the same image, both of which are sliced into vertical segments and interleaved on a single surface.

The team’s HR3D system uses two layers of liquid-crystal displays.  The top LCD displays a pattern customized to the image beneath it.

This top layer consists of thousands of tiny slits, whose orientations follow the contours of the objects in the image.

The slits are oriented in so many different directions that the 3D illusion is consistent no matter whether the image is upright or rotated 90 degrees.

Lanman said in a statement that if a device like the 3DS used HR3D then its battery life would be longer because the parallax barrier would block less light.

The 3D image would also be consistent no matter the viewing angle.

“The great thing about Ramesh’s group is that they think of things that no one else has thought of and then demonstrate that they can actually be done,” Neil Dodgson, professor of graphics and imaging at the University of Cambridge in England, said in a statement.

“It’s quite a clever idea they’ve got here.”

However, Dodgson said that HR3D is very computationally intensive.

“If you’re saving battery power because you’ve got this extra brightness, but you’re actually using all that battery power to do the computation, then you’re not saving anything,” he says.

See the full article from Red Orbit here>>

Next For 3D Movies: Better, Brighter Technology for the Screen and For Your Glasses

There is no doubt that 3D movies are here to stay. The people who do such things came to CinemaCon, the annual gathering of that National Association of Theater Owners, attended by exhibitors, studios and manufacturers of movie going accoutrements from seats to snacks, to tell those in attendance what others changes are being brought by 3D.

For example, back in the day, 3D movies were projected on any old screen that happened to be hanging in the theater. Now, however, screens are specialized for exhibiting digital and 3D film. Read more…

Electronics Analysts Give Approval Rating To LG’s New 3D TV Technology

Dubai, UAE. 14 April, 2011 – With the outbreak of a format battle to rival the VHS-Betamax war of the 1970s, the future of 3D television technology is being fought on the one side by Shutter-Glass type screens and on the other, by a new technology dubbed Cinema 3D, developed by LG electronics.

In a March 2011 survey, analysts in Korea have just given LG Electronics a boost in the format battle by scoring their preference for Cinema 3D technology over shutter-glasses (SG) type screens.

“The crucial difference between the two technologies is the way the screen creates and transmits the 3D image – one using a ‘flicker’ type technology with battery-operated shutter-glasses that synchronously ‘shutter’ the image shown to each eye,” said Mr. K. W. Kim, CEO, LG Electronics Middle East and Africa. “The other, LG’s new Cinema 3D technology that allows lighter, cheaper glasses and can be viewed from wider angles and virtually any seating position.”

A comparative test and survey was conducted among analysts from 33 securities firms and the overall result was a 57.1 percent approval rating for Cinema 3D against a 35.7 percent rating for its nearest rival. Analysts marked viewing comfort as the highest rated attribute of LG’s technology finding the ‘flicker’ effect of rival SG technology the aspect most in need of improvement.

 See the full story here>>

iPad 2 Goes 3D And Glasses-Free

3D iPad 2

With 3D HDTVs rising in popularity, many people are intrigued about owning a 3D device, but some just don’t want to pay the extra $150 per pair of 3D glasses. Owners of the iPad 2, however, may be happy to know that glasses-free 3D capabilities may be on the way for the new tablet, thanks to the addition of a front-facing camera in the second generation iPad.

Researchers in France’s Engineering Human-Computer Interaction Research Group have developed a hack for the iPad 2 that they call Head-Coupling Perspective, which can track the position and movements of a person’s head in 3D. But the 3D image the user sees doesn’t actually come out of the screen like most 3D images seem to do. Instead, it stretches back into the screen.

Working in a similar way to the Nintendo 3DS, but reminding us more of the DS game Rittai Kakushi e Attakoreda, it’s basically a 3D representation on a 2D screen that follows you as you move. According to the EHCI site, researches used “off-axis projection to adapt the perspective of the 3D scene.”

 See the full article here>>

Samsung, Sony, Panasonic, Sharp, Haier and Changhong announce active shutter 3D TV alliance in Beijing

The heat is on in the debate between two 3-D TV formats.

Samsung Electronics, the world’s largest maker of liquid-crystal display (LCD) panels, announced yesterday that it formed “3-D TV alliances” in Beijing over the weekend with five other TV makers: Sony, Panasonic, Sharp, Haier and Changhong.

The six companies, which accounted for 90 percent of the Chinese 3-D TV market last year, agreed that the active shutter glasses format is the best technology for a full high-definition, 3-D experience, while vowing to expand their presence with the format, Samsung said.

There are two kinds of 3-D technology in use: active shutter glasses and passive polarized glasses. The key difference is that while the former creates a sense of depth by sending visual information to each eye sequentially, the latter does so by sending visual information to both eyes simultaneously.

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LG launches 3D tablet

Korean company LG is set to launch a new tablet with 3D recording capabilities at the World Mobile Conference.

There is no official announcement from LG yet on the Optimus Pad, but several sources are claiming to have confirmation of the specification, which includes a 3D camera and 8.9 inch screen capable of displaying autostereoscopic 3D content.

Tablets may well open up a new avenue for 3D content, with the small screen sizes they are ideally suited to glasses-free 3D, which at present is only really possible on smaller screens, and on devices which users tend to use facing directly at the screen, unlike a TV.

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Vivitek reveals its own 3D-ready LED pocket projector

Vivitek Corporation has chosen the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2011 to launch its new LED-based Qumi pocket projector, which is aimed at enhancing the brand’s reputation for projection devices across a range of applications.

The diminutive device – which falls somewhere between a tablet device and smartphone in terms of size – is the first pocket, or ‘pico’ projector that is 3D-ready through the use of Texas Instruments’ DLP Link technology.

It has touch-sensitive button controls and a sleek design, but the pleasing aesthetics do not stop it from being compatible with a huge range of input devices, including digital cameras, laptops, smart phones and tablets.

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