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Coming soon: 3D on your mobile phone (THE TIMES) by Alex Pell and Mark Harris Touchscreens may be all the rage today, but their replacement, reach-out-and-touch-me screens, is already being lined up. The first displays that can show three-dimensional video without the need for silly spectacles are about to be launched. The new type of screen, known as Vikuiti, is made by 3M — the American technology giant behind key elements of the iPhone’s display. The technology is suitable for smartphones and handheld games consoles with screens of up to nine inches. It will enable users to watch 3-D films and games without having to wear polarised glasses — let alone the old red-and-green type. The development also has obvious applications for sat nav gadgets — imagine realistic contours on a map. We tested one of the first screens at 3M’s laboratories in Minnesota. There is a slight flicker as the screen switches from 2-D to 3-D, but then it feels entirely natural to watch it. Seen head-on, the effect is convincing. The demonstration we saw included video of a four-wheel-drive vehicle driving through a realistic-looking 3-D landscape, a Lord of the Rings-style CGI animation and shots of an American football game in which a football looms out of the screen towards the viewer. The video clips had none of the cardboard-cut-out look that typifies low-rent 3-D effects, nor did they induce the nausea that can plague viewers. The 3-D effect was, however, better with video than still images. So when will you be able to get your hands on one? Toshiba, one of the world’s biggest manufacturers of LCDs, has already signed up to build the new 3M Vikuiti screens for other handset makers. In addition, 3M says it has struck deals to supply at least one phone manufacturer that wants to bring out the new 3-D screens. 3M was tight-lipped about when the first phones or gaming devices would be launched but said the new technology won’t be restricted to a single brand. “There will be no exclusive deals,” said Erik Jostes, a director of 3M Optical Systems. Intriguingly, Jostes also said: “We are in a device you can actually buy today,” but refused to give any more hints. He did add that, although the technology is primarily for phones, the very first Vikuiti device is not a mobile. The identities of the handset makers with which deals have been struck to mass-produce the first wave of Vikuiti-based phones unfortunately also remain a mystery. Perhaps Apple is among them — the iPhone maker has certainly expressed an interest in 3-D. A better clue, however, may be in the name that briefly, and it seems accidentally, flashed on screen during 3M’s PowerPoint presentation of its new technology to The Sunday Times: the words Sony Ericsson fleetingly appeared. The mobile-phone manufacturer declined to comment. In recent years several tech firms, including Samsung, Sharp and Hitachi, have also made a stab at the 3-D mobile-phone screen. Their handsets were based on the simple premise of placing an opaque grid known as a parallax barrier in front of the screen, so that each eye sees a slightly different part of an image, thereby creating the illusion of depth. This technique, pioneered by the French painter GA Bois-Clair in 1692, works only as long as the viewer’s head remains still. The new Vikuiti displays, on the other hand, have a bigger “sweet spot” in which the effect works — and even if you move outside the 3-D viewing angle, the screen still looks good in 2-D. This is a big step forward in handset technology, says Neil Dodgson, a 3-D screen expert at Cambridge University. The system exchanges the simple backlight of LCD displays for two columns of LEDs, one at either side of the screen. The columns light up individually, depending on whether the image is for the left or the right eye. “It then uses mirrors, prisms and other elements to direct the light,” Dodgson explains. It steers the light by a few degrees as it leaves the screen, so that each eye sees a different image. The system assumes your eyes are 65mm (2Åin) apart, and you are directly facing the screen. The main benefit of the new approach is that there is no loss of resolution. This is because all the clever stuff takes place behind the LCD front panel, whereas most existing 3-D screens apply distorting effects after the light passes through the LCD, so reducing sharpness. It is also cheaper to make, as most of the components are off the shelf. However, because the system sends out twice as much information as a conventional screen, it demands an LCD panel that refreshes at twice the normal speed — and therefore a powerful processor. The million-dollar question is whether there is sufficient 3-D content to make the new technology attractive to consumers. According to 3M, Vikuiti works with the majority of 3-D content, if it is in the appropriate file format. Some Hollywood films are already available in 3-D, as are sporting events (Sky is experimenting with the technology), and it may soon be possible to create home-movie footage with 3-D camcorders — not such a huge leap given that you can already buy, for £429, the Fujifilm Finepix 3DW1 compact camera, which is capable of shooting 3-D images. There are already hundreds of PC-based games that can be viewed in 3-D. “Most current games already have the depth information needed to run in 3-D, so there is no reason they couldn’t be easily adapted to run on the new 3M screens, assuming they work in the first place,” said Ian Grimstead, an expert in 3-D imaging from Cardiff University. There have recently been advances in the conversion of conventional 2-D footage to 3-D. What used to involve painstaking re-engineering of the original material can now be done on computer. A firm called Dynamic Digital Depth (DDD) says it has developed PC software called TriDef that enables “any 2-D video signal to be converted to stereoscopic 3-D in real time during video playback”. This achievement can be seen on Acer’s new CineReal laptop and DDD says it can be added to phones. The firm has an online library of 3-D videos that will be available as downloads from Yabazam.com this week. So the future looks promising for the 3-D phone — 3M is certainly confident its breakthrough will be a commercial success. “There hasn’t been a bigger improvement to the viewing experience since the introduction of colour screens,” says 3M’s senior technical manager, Bill Bryan. This, of course, sounds fanciful — but it didn’t take long for monochrome mobile phones to sink beneath the waterline once colour phones had gone on sale at reasonable prices. So it may not be too long before all mobile phones are made like this. If you see fellow train passengers flinch as Indiana Jones snaps his whip, you’ll know why. |
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