Glasses-free 3D viewing on mobile devices — Alternate Reality apps are going to BLOW UP.
I had heard rumors of this last year from some real alpha-nerds at a tech conference. I was immediately intrigued, but ultimately dismissed it as “vaporware,” because of all the problems I’ve heard from professionals just trying to deal with 3D when using projection equipment the size of a pickup truck.
This going to make for some compelling advertising. Also games. Videos. Photo galleries.
Well, it looks like 3M is going to be demonstrating a 3D display at the SID Symposium next month. From the tech diagram on their site, it looks like the 3D effect is achieved by using an LCD equivalent of the old “Viewmaster” parallax eye-trickery. That is, projecting a slightly different image to the right eye than to the left eye, and the image-stitching that our brain does to reconcile these views is what gives us depth perception.
I know that the CES show in Las Vegas in January was full of all kinds of 3D-TV whizbangery, all of which got a “meh” response from most of the tech journalists in attendance … mostly because the cost seemed prohibitive, and evolutionary (rather than revolutionary) developments in displays seem not to be getting much traction (if the court please, enter “Blu-Ray sales figures” as Exhibit A). And from a common-sense perspective, this seems to be about right – most people I know are still integrating their plasma/LCD HDTVs into their lives, so there’s not much love about these days for the prospect of ripping those bigscreens out and replacing them with something for which there is even less dedicated content than HDs.
But the mobile display market? People are accustomed to swapping out their phones every two years or so (or whenever we can get out from under whichever abusive, gouging carrier contract we put up with), so a mobile phone with a 3D screen might just be able to get quicker adoption than its bigger brethren.
The skeptical part of me is already trying to poke holes in this, figuring that the 3D tech is going to require you to hold the phone at precisely the right distance from your eyes to make the images reconcile in a way that looks good, rather than blurry; kind of like a farsighted guy trying to read a restaurant menu in dim light, bringing it forward and back, trying to find the right focus plane.
But even if that is the case … holy freakin’ Minority Report! Imagine using the camera+display tech that cutting-edge advertisements like the Doritos Late Night Chips virtual concert with Blink-182 only now it really pops out and plays in the palm of your hand. Or a virtual-reality map overlay of a city that you’re doing a tour of, where you can walk the streets of ancient Rome and see the Coliseum and the Fiats rolling by you in the street are morphed into chariots… or how-to videos showing you to reach around the toner cartridge to clear the paper jam.
I predict a lot of people walking into lampposts, and cars being driven into ditches. It’ll certainly bring some extra oomph to “sexting.”
Here’s the Doritos alternate-reality app, for those of you who want a glimpse of the future:
