About 18 months into the 3D ‘revolution’ one thing is clear – customers don’t want to wear those stupid glasses. The sooner glasses-free tech arrives, the better.
Blame the presence of just one dedicated 3D channel (Sky 3D), blame the lack of 3D Blu-rays or just blame those silly and overpriced glasses, but 3D tech in the home is not yet living up to expectations, for consumers or supplier’s balance sheets.
Glasses-free tech, though in its early days, could very well be the saving grace.
With Nintendo’s 3DS handheld hitting stores on March 25, the console is seen by many as a litmus test for the viability of glasses-free technology – after all, if Nintendo mess things up, what hope have Sony/Samsung and others?
While we’ve seen glasses-free 3D in a few home consumer devices, they’ve typically been the reserve of much smaller screens, such as Sony’s recent 3D camcorders showcased at the Consumer Electronics Show 2011 or Nintendo’s aforementioned handheld.
What we demand is a regular TV-sized unit to blow our minds. Although failing that, sure, we’ll settle for a 200-inch display instead.
Technology so impressive, you’ll want to put your hand in a shark’s mouth
That’s exactly what the boffins at Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NiCT) have come up with and, as you can see, within seconds it turns any child into a gurning, shark-petting moron.
Unveiled at the end of January, the prototype 200-inch screen is the largest glasses-free 3D display in the world.
NICT had already developed a 70-inch glasses-free 3D display using multiple projectors to determine the basic principles of operation before setting to work on the 200-inch monster above.
In NiCT’s own words, progress was difficult: “One of the main impediments to image quality is the strip noise between parallax images [In other words, the variations of colour and brightness when the image is viewed from different angles].
“We were able to reduce the strip noise by introducing additional functions in each projector unit to adjust, with high accuracy, the brightness uniformities and color balance of each projected image.”
Impressive jargon, we’re sure you’ll agree. Of course, ‘introducing additional functions’ is NiCT’s tech jargon for ‘wizardry’ – wizards do exist and only they could create a glasses-free 3D experience on a screen that large. Your secret is safe with us NiCT.
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