Toshiba says it has developed new technology that allows viewing of three-dimensional images on a flat display screen, and that the 3-D images can be seen without special glasses or other visual aids. Some in the adult industry say that the development potentially could be used in arcade and adult games.
"I've seen some of that kind of stuff," VirtuallyJenna developer Brad Abrams told AVNOnline.com. "I think Panasonic has a 3-D kind of laptop [device], and I don't think you need special glasses for that one, either. VirutallyJenna [could work] as a holographic type of projection with [the flat-display 3-D technology]."
Abrams said he expects the technology to take off, "but it could be so expensive," meaning another three years or possibly a little longer before it gains any popularity. Toshiba, for its part, hopes to make consumer products with the technology available within two years.
"Viewing the display from an angle allows the viewer to experience 3-D images that stand out several centimeters from the surface of the display," the Japanese consumer-electronics giant said in an April 15 announcement. "The new technology opens up new areas of application for 3-D displays, including arcade games, e-learning, simulations of buildings and landscapes, and even 3-D menus in restaurants."
Toshiba plans to exhibit the new display technology during the International FPD Expo April 20 to April 22 in Tokyo, one of several dozen companies showing off the latest in flat-panel-display technology and products.
The company said 3-D displays that don't require glasses and other aids work by projecting "slightly different images" to each eye in a kind of "visual stereo," with the displays consisting of micro-lenses controlling the direction of the light emitted and supporting software creating images. But the company added that mainstream 3-D technology is limited in viewing angles and "tiring to view."
The new Toshiba displays, the company said, use what they call an integral-imaging system reproducing light beams similar to those produced by real objects and not their visual representations.
"The difference in the distance from the eye to the center of a display, and from the eye to the display's edges and corners, is greater for a flatbed display than for a standard upright display," Toshiba said. "In seeking reproduction of natural 3-D images on the flatbed display, [we] developed proprietary software that utilizes 10 or more views of an object (the current prototype takes 12 or 16), either live-action images or CG images, and which processes and reproduces the images in 3-D, with a wide viewing angle."
Toshiba also said they developed middleware and dedicated circuitry supporting fast playback of images with nothing more than a graphics card.
