A lot of big-time corporate muscle is getting behind 3D for home, office, and industrial applications. And Insight Media (full disclosure coming) is involved in the management of the rapidly growing 3D @ Home Consortium.

Ken Werner
Senior Analyst and Editor

Nonetheless, 3D for everything except cinema is clearly a work - or many works - in progress. So I took advantage of my visit to Flat Panel Display International (FPDI) in Yokohama last week to give myself a crash course in what 3D displays actually look like today. This was easy to do because you couldn’t have ignored the 3D displays in Yokohama even if you tried. FPDI even organized a 3D corner to make it easier for companies to exhibit 3D displays, software, and (in one case) media.

It quickly became clear that the high-quality approach for 3D TV is to alternate the left- and right-eye views on a Full HD display, with an accelerated frame rate. The two views are separated by active switching glasses connected to the host system. This was the approach demonstrated by both Panasonic and Samsung Electronics. Panasonic’s host system was a plasma TV (of course) running at 120Hz. Samsung’s was an LCD-TV running at 240Hz. For the few minutes of screen time I had with these systems, motion blur wasn’t an issue for either one.

These systems present an excellent 3D experience, and the images are at full screen resolution. A lot has to be done right in the production of the 3D media. It was in both cases, and the result was rock-solid images without any of the conflicting cues that can produce various forms of discomfort. Panasonic’s presentation was in a 3D theater on a very large (103") plasma screen. Part of the well-produced content was a clip from James Cameron’s forthcoming movie Avatar. Panasonic made a great deal of the quality being the result of Panasonic’s control of the entire recording and playback process, including Panasonic 3D cameras and 3D Blu-ray Disk player.

Downsides? Even after a few minutes, I became very much aware of the switching glasses I was wearing. (The glasses used by Panasonic and Samsung seemed quite similar.) Wearing them for an hour or more might become quite annoying. Much lighter active glasses, connected with a thin wire instead of wirelessly, were being used in an effective OCB-mode 32-inch display from Toshiba Mobile Display, and they were much more comfortable. The glasses used OCB, as well as the display.

The other major downside is the significant reduction in luminance with glasses-based approaches. In movie theaters we quickly adapt to very dim images. Will the same be true in home environments?

There are a variety of active and passive glasses-based approaches, most of which are not as effective as the switching glasses described above.

The other major category of 3D displays is autostereoscopic 3D (AS-3D), which present 3D images without glasses thanks to optical layers - usually centering around lenticular lenses or optical barriers - that separate the left- and right-eye views in space rather than time. There’s an obvious appeal here for applications such as walk-by advertising, but such technologies generally exact a heavy penalty. The viewer’s eyes have to be in a predetermined sweet spot to see a more-or-less clear 3D image. Multiple sweet spots make it easier for the viewer to find one (or just walk through one as he passes a 3D kiosk or sign), but multiple sweet spots come at the cost of reduced 3D resolution and viewing angle for each viewing zone.

Most of the AS-3D displays at FPDI failed to present a solid-looking imaging when the image was projected in front of the image plane, which is one of the things you would want to do if you’re trying to grab the attention of a passer-by. Left/right cross-talk is also a common problem, which contributes to that lack of image solidity. The word "squirrelly" appears frequently in my notes. An AUO representative said there are trade-offs between image disparity (greater disparity for greater 3D effect) and cross-talk, and between cross-talk and moiré. Moiré is more visible on brighter displays, he said.

AUO had a nice-looking 32-inch lenticular AS-3D with 12 viewing zones. Base display resolution was 1920×1080, and the 3D image was 480×360. (You do pay for all those zones.) The images looked good and there was a pronounced 3D effect. It was easy to locate a sweet spot, but each zone is narrow, so rather small head movements would take you out of the zone you were in.

Samsung had a large (52-inch) AS-3D with 9 viewing zones, each with 640×360 resolution, with images that were crisp and as clear as you could expect with 640×360 pixels.

A unique - and uniquely effective - AS-3D technology is based on 3M’s 3D directional film. A 2.8-inch display, similar to the one shown at SID in June, was on display in 3M’s booth, as was a 9-inch version. The film using alternating backlight LEDs located at opposite edges of the panel. Depending on which LED is on, the film directs the image to one eye or the other. This is something like the shutter-glasses approach without the glasses: the left- and right-eye views alternate and are at the display’s full base resolution. Cross-talk is currently 10%, said 3M’s Art Lathrop, and 3M engineers feel they can get it down to between 3 and 5%. (The 10% looked pretty good in the 3M booth.) Shutter glasses are at 1 to 3%. The technology is limited to small and medium displays, Lathrop said, but there are plenty of applications in that size range.

We’ll have a lot more to say about the 3D displays seen in Yokohama in the upcoming issues of Insight Media’s subscription newsletters.