Will Your Next Display Be 3D?

Yasushi Yamamoto thinks the time may be right for three-dimensional display technology.

Twenty years after a generation of movie-goers filed into theaters, 3D glasses in hand, to watch a mechanical shark lunge at them in "Jaws 3D", the Sharp employee says a new generation of display technologies may soon have you dodging computer-generated foes, getting a close up view of a bug on the rain forest's floor, or taking a stomach-churning trip inside your own body.

He's not alone. Led by Sharp and Sanyo Electric, more than 100 companies formed the 3D Consortium (3DC) a year ago to jointly promote 3D hardware and software. Among the group, of which Yamamoto works for the management secretariat, are some of the best known names in electronics, including Sony, Toshiba, Samsung Electronics, and LG Electronics.

The group was formed to solve a classic chicken-and-egg problem dogging 3D, Yamamoto says: Without an installed base of hardware there is no software, but nobody wants to pay a premium for hardware without software.

Sharp Displays

The kick the industry needs might come from Sharp. It has developed a dual-mode LCD that can display 3D images or be switched to act like a conventional 2D display. That's a big step because most previous displays were 3D only and required lots of specially written software. Few people want to invest in such a screen without the promise of content.

The 3D function of the display works because of a set of vertical black lines in front of the display. These lines, known as a parallax barrier, are positioned such that each of your eyes only sees half the pixels. This effectively halves the total resolution of the display but allows for a 3D image to be seen without any special glasses. Yamamoto says the 3D effect more than makes up for the lower resolution.

Sharp has already put this display into two cellular telephones for NTT DoCoMo. Combined sales of the handsets have passed the 1 million mark, Yamamoto says. That's pretty impressive for a 3D device, although he admits it is impossible to know how many people bought the phones because of the 3D screen and how many people are using the 3D content. The telephones came with two Java games that make use of the 3D mode.

Causing much more excitement in the 3D community recently has been the release by of a couple of notebook computers using the switchable screens from Sharp: Sharp's PC-RD3D, launched late last year and NEC's Lavie S LS900/8E, launched in January.

In 2D mode you couldn't tell the display apart from other Windows XP-based notebook computers but on switching to 3D mode, objects begin jumping out of the screen.

Past the PC

For this type of display to really take off among consumers, researchers and product designers are going to have to make this technology stable on large screens that can be used in living rooms, says Ashley Domis, an analyst with ARS in La Jolla, California.

"They're cool for gaming, they're cool for movies, but who wants to sit around a 17-inch monitor and watch a three-hour movie?" Domis says.

Sanyo might have a solution soon. More than a year ago it demonstrated a prototype 50-inch Plasma Display Panel that can show 3D images and says it hopes to be in a position to begin supplying samples of the display in the first half of 2004.

What they are likely to cost is unknown. The two notebooks from Sharp and NEC both have hefty price tags of $3000 and $3600 respectively. That's probably too much to enable mass consumer adoption, but not a barrier for business users, says Yamamoto. Right now a lot of business applications are being developed that make use of the technology, he says.

One of the key members of the 3DC, NTT Data, has a large amount of mapping data of Japan and is working on ways to represent that in three dimensions. Applications in medicine are also envisaged and Yamamoto reports that doctors who have seen data from scans assembled into a 3D image are impressed with the technology.

Back in the consumer market content remains a problem although NEC is trying to entice buyers with a 3D version of the popular Final Fantasy game. Getting more content on the market remains a prime goal of the 3DC, too, and several software companies, including Namco and Microsoft are members.

That's Entertainment

Entertainment content in 3D might be available soon in Japan. A new satellite broadcasting service that is due to be launched in the middle of this year by Mobile Broadcasting (MBCO) will beam video to small handheld devices. Sharp is considering the development of a terminal with 3D display and the provision of some 3D programming, says MBCO.

Another consortium member, Dynamic Digital Depth in the U.S., is working on adding an additional dimension to existing 2D. It's a time-consuming job as the first and last frames of each scene have to be manually coded with depth information to indicate while objects are in the foreground and which are in the background. A machine then takes over for the other frames in a scene, but they all have to be checked and then the same is done for the next scene. In something like a music video with lots of cuts between cameras it takes a long time, says Theresa Roth-Borunda, a spokesperson for the company.

She estimates turning a 10-minute video clip into a 3D image takes around a week.

The other solution is to create the content in 3D from the start. That's how 3D will take off in the consumer space, estimates Yamamoto. A number of digital camera makers are part of the 3DC and one of them, Pentax, is already selling cameras that can take rudimentary 3D images.

Beyond 3D

Others, like Steven Smith, a research specialist with MIT's Media Laboratory, are dreaming beyond today's displays and thinking about even more advanced 3D imaging. His group is working on displays that maintain the full resolution of an image while displaying it in three dimensions.

MIT is working to create a display that lets multiple users view 3D images without having to stare at one portion of the screen or view images of poor resolution. Their technique requires a fast processor to refresh an LCD screen about twice as fast as current screens are capable, Smith says.

These displays are called full resolution autostereoscopic displays. A viewer can move their head from side to side, or get up and walk around, and the image will still appear in three dimensions. The trick is to refresh the images at speeds incapable of detection by the human eye, so multiple viewing areas can be created with no impact to resolution or the viewer's position.

The processing power is already here to allow this to happen, Smith says. Graphics card manufacturers such as Nvidia or ATI Technologies already make some of the most sophisticated and powerful graphics technology in the world, but most of their customers cana??t take advantage of their full potential due to CPU or memory bottlenecks.

Likewise, display technologies are not yet sophisticated enough to accept images at the speeds required to enable autostereoscopic 3D images, Smith says.

He acknowledges the timeframe for this technology extends into the future, but isn't worried about how long it might take.

The 3D display industry has already evolved from researchers and hobbyists building products in their garages to companies that are submitting prototypes at conferences and trade shows, Smith says. The PC industry grew much the same way.

The next step beyond 3D imagery is the projection of holographic images, where the viewer could walk in a circle around an object and see detail from all sides. Once screen resolutions improve to a certain point, like 10,000 pixels by 3,000 pixels, this technology will also change the entertainment and design engineering worlds, Smith says.