Hands on with Acer's 3D laptop
Polarising specs at the ready...
First Look Acer will enter the record books today by releasing the world’s first 3D-capable laptop. So Register Hardware caught-up with the firm behind the technology – Dynamic Digital Depth – to discover how 3D content will look on Acer’s machine.
The 15.6in Acer Aspire 5738DZG 3D laptop has a screen that is coated with a thin 3D film. You wear polarising glasses rather than active shutter or red and green anaglyph glasses.
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DDD’s TriDef software, which can be used with any GPU, facilitates playback of both 2D and 3D content, company President Chris Yewdall told Register Hardware.
Our initial response to the on-screen 3D display was good and - despite it only being capable of a 720p resolution – the content was clear, crisp and vibrant.
The depth of the 3D image displayed depends heavily on the screen’s tilt angle. Angle the screen too far forward or too far back and you’ll probably only see a blurred 2D image – as you do when you take the glasses off altogether.
While the laptop is supplied with a stylish and light pair of polarising glasses, Yewdall claimed that opticians aren't too far away from offering to make up prescription 3D glasses. In the short-term, though, DDD can also supply a pair of clip-on polarising specs.
Converting 2D into 3D is as simple as right click with TriDef
Acer’s 5738DG won’t display everything in 3D, so you can forget browsing through Windows 7’s icons in 3D or jazzing up Excel with 3D spreadsheets. TriDef is largely limited to media content.
TriDef enables almost any 2D content to be transformed into 3D, Yewdall explained, as he took us through a slideshow of 2D photos converted into 3D. He also showed us a selection of movies and games that TriDef converted into 3D.
For the user, this conversion process is as simple as right-clicking on say, a JPEG, and selecting “Play with TriDef Media Player”.
The difference in 3D quality between a film and JPEG or videogame was negligible, in our opinion.
COMMENTS
Baby steps
Wake me up when I can do it in hardware (no Windows dependency) and without glasses.
@Peter Gathercole
We used "flashing stereo" glasses for molecular modelling back in the eighties: the first lot of glasses were quite dangerous - lead tartrate, I think they were, and you needed lots of volts across your forehead (effectively) to get them to work.
Not long after that, we had proper LCD ones - the graphics system (an Evans & Sutherland PS300) would alternate left and right views many times a second, and in the bottom cornier of the screen was a pair of white squares that we blutacked a pair of sensors over: when the left square was lit, the right eye was shaded, and vice versa.
Net result, glorious, ghostly protein molecules tumbling in the air over the keyboard....
Glasses - obviously!
Good news for Blender...
and all the other 3D content creation tools - IF these take off en masse. I still have my doubts, but I will definately be taking a look at one soon as my main lappy is getting old...I just hope it is a good LAPTOP first, that happens to have a 3D screen.
3D from JPEGS
Does anyone know how this works?
I could really use something that can extract 3D information from JPEGS. It would be great to allow me to add focus blur to images to change the depth-of-field after a picture has been taken.
It could also mean people can avoid buying those expensive new fangled 3D cameras (as in a new-fangled version of something that has been around since the 70's)
