Unretouched video of a display showing 3d stereo imagery without glasses.
For the last four months or so, I’ve been in beautiful Aptos, near the beach and Santa Cruz, creating content for some “glasses-free” stereoscopic displays.
The displays can be very striking to see in reality, with well-designed content especially. They are designed by a Paris, France, based company called Alisocopy, and I’m working for a new company called Magicscreen3d creating content for them, and helping refine their marketing strategy and website.
The displays are quite expensive, and often creating content for them is also expensive, so they currently are most suitable for commercial public advertising and signage.
With the increased interest and acceptance of 3d stereoscopic movies by mainstream audiences, these glasses-free displays have huge potential, but I think they face a challenging future in the marketplace at first because of cost, and to a certain extent, because of simply innate human wariness of the new.
They also can place a greater demand on the viewer than a regular display, as moving the head a little from side to side is necessary to seek and find the best viewing spot, and to fully appreciate the 3d view, although the effect is robust enough to be clearly apparent to a quickly passing pedestrian.
My skepticism for the technology was dispelled at a party thrown at a high end hamburger joint in one of the wealthy towns at the very center of Silicon Valley prosperity, Los Gatos, a few miles from Apple HQ, in which Magicscreen3d displayed a 50 inch alioscopic screen on the top of the coke machine.
Adults at the gathering were transfixed and mystified by the display, looking for cues in the faces of other viewers as to whether they should be slightly appalled, or excited and pleased by the 3d effect. But a small boy, probably only six or seven years old, stared up at the display absolutely transfixed, with an expression of absolute wonder and delight.
That child’s reaction, without guile or artifice, convinced me that there should be a future for the displays – they made people smile!
The cost barrier to their wider adoption is not helped by a consumer culture well experienced in hugely plummeting costs of new technologies, but I suspect the cost of these displays will not be falling as much, and as soon, as some potential buyers might expect.
An important thing which could potentially keep prices relatively high is that these displays actually display many more images at once to viewers than a stereo pair, generally eight images or more, in order to give the passing viewer a sensation of moving relative to the displayed content. This allows the displays to operate without glasses or motion tracking technology, making them much more suitable for presenting to passing or moving crowds, or to larger groups of people.
The competing style of glasses-free stereo displays uses only two views, and so must use motion tracking technology to adjust the display to focus the stereo view at the point the viewer is looking from, but this does not work well with large numbers of viewers, or with quickly passing casual crowds. And I daresay they never will, simply because of the physical limitation of focusing the stereo view on multiple viewer locations.
For multiview displays to perform best, specialized content must be created that has eight viewpoints of each video frame, making them not completely compatible with regular stereo content like movies, and they will never be fully compatible, because properly prepared content featuring the full eight custom created views actually offers the viewer an experience which exceeds the depth effect of footage simply converted from regular stereo footage otherwise created for regular stereo displays.
The crowd-friendly multiview technology holds great promise I think. It is a technology quite different, and in some ways much more powerful, than simple stereo display technology, which only displays two views at once of a given video image.
Because eight or more images of each video frame are needed to take best advantage of multiview displays, optimized multiview imagery will never be part of the mainstream maketplace for stereo displays, and “regular” stereo imagery from the likes of Hollywood, and mainstream consumer electronics, will never be fully optimized for display on multiview screens.
Multiview technology, while having the significant advantage over regular stereo displays in catering well to passing crowds, has definite technical limitations, and probably its biggest is that really only a single virtual depth plane of the image is sharp.
Objects that appear to pop out of the screen become progressively more blurry, and objects that are set back virtually into the screen become progressively more blurred also, making the effect more like a macro, telephoto or large aperture photograph with narrow depth of field. Most images look a little like the “tilt-shift” style post-processed images you see increasingly on the web.
The 3d effect also works best only a fixed distance from the display – in my case for the particular 50 inch display I’m mainly working with, the optimum distance was calibrated to be around 10 feet away from the display.
Below are some animated GIFs showing a simulation of what a viewer would see on the displays when they move their head from side to side, revealing the 3d field of view the displays provide (not to belabor the point (!), but they provide 8 views ie more than the typical stereo or two views.)
And see here some of the content I designed and created to showcase the displays’ abilities edited together. The linked to clip shows only one view of course – the content was also created from seven other views also so viewers’ of the display can perceive the depth effect.
Promoting cosmetics maker Inglot, and their small square cups of face makeup
Demonstration display advertising for jeweler
Interior signage display
