| Sumario: | The "stereoptikon", which appears to depict three-dimensional scenes, was wildly popular at the 1851 Great Exhibition in London. The stereoptikon works by showing a slightly different photograph to each eye, fooling the brain into creating a three-dimensional (3D) composite. Engineers at the Japanese-owned Sharp Laboratories of Europe, in Oxford, England, use the same technique in a recently developed 3D liquid-crystal display (LCD). Although the coloured glasses of recent vintage are less obtrusive than the microscope-like stereoptikon apparatus, Stephen Bold, managing director of Sharp Laboratories, believes that, for a 3D display to become truly popular, it must work without any glasses at all. The ploy that Sharp uses is to set up a zebra-like grating, known as a parallax barrier, either just in front of or just behind an ordinary LCD. The opaque stripes on the grating block different pixels for each eye, because the angle from the screen to the left and right eyes differs. Dr Bold imagines that the switch from two- to three-dimensional liquid-crystal displays could be even more significant than the wholesale conversion from black-and-white to color that took the computer industry by storm a decade ago.
|
|---|