New York:
Smartphones are getting smarter. Now some new models even offer games or television broadcasts in three dimensions -- and you don't need special glasses to see the show.
Traditional 3-D technology used for movie screens and television superimposes or alternates two views, using filters or shutters in the glasses to select a view for each eye. This creates an illusion of depth. But a new generation of devices, many of them hand-held and now in prototype, dispense with the pesky glasses. Instead, they use optics and other technology built into the display to steer one view directly to the left eye, and the other view to the right.
Glasses-free 3-D effects are easier to produce on a small, portable screen than on a large, stationary one, said Paul Semenza, a senior vice president at the market researcher DisplaySearch in Santa Clara, Calif. That's because the viewer can easily adjust the angle and position of the display by hand to take best advantage of the 3-D view.
"You can put yourself in the sweet spot," he said. "That easy, intuitive adjustment viewers can make is one of the reasons that this technology will probably succeed in the mobile space."
The devices offer extra drama for sports broadcasts. Footballs or baseballs "seem to pop out of the display as through they were headed right toward you," said Chris Chinnock, president of Insight Media, a marketing research firm in Norwalk, Connecticut.
On mobile devices, 3-D works well for advertising, he said. "The 3-D process can throw the spotlight very effectively on an icon or product," he said. Cans of soda, for example, can emerge dramatically from the background.
Samsung Electronics introduced its 3-D W960 touch-screen phone in May in South Korea, and customers are already using it to watch TV shows and music videos, said Eunju Hwang, a spokeswoman for the company in Seoul. The retail price is about $150, but prices may vary among carriers, Ms. Hwang said.
Other companies have also announced glasses-free mobile 3-D displays, Mr. Semenza said. At a video game industry trade show last month in Los Angeles, Nintendo, for example, demonstrated a 3-D portable game device that requires no special eyewear. Nokia has demonstrated a 3-D cellphone, he said, and Hitachi is selling a 3-D phone in Japan.
The market for glasses-free, or "auto-stereoscopic," 3-D is small right now, Mr. Semenza said, but will grow rapidly as the technology is incorporated into laptops, notebooks, digital cameras, camcorders, digital picture frames and game devices. The company is forecasting that about 1.7 million glasses-free 3-D units will be sold worldwide in 2011, including about 1.3 million 3-D mobile phones.
Many companies are competing to be part of this projected 3-D wave. For example, 3M in St. Paul has developed an optical film coupled to banks of light-emitting diodes, or LED's mounted within the left and right sides of the display, said Erik Jostes, director of the company's optical systems division. Light from the LED's shines through the film to project images to the left eye and then to the right eye.
Microsoft has created a prototype for an auto-stereoscopic display that viewers needn't adjust by hand to find the sweet spot. Instead, an unusual lens paired with cameras in the display keep track of where the viewer is, then steer separate, narrow columns of video to each eye, said Steven Bathiche, director of research for Microsoft's applied sciences group. In the future, he said, the light-steering technology can be used for 3-D televisions, laptops and mobile phones.
TO build the prototype, the researchers bought a 3-D television that refreshes at 120 hertz rather than the typical 60 hertz of a standard TV, so could provide a refresh rate of 60 hertz for each of the two video beams. At a rate of less than 60 hertz, and the eye perceives flicker.
"We threw out the glasses, took the TV apart and replaced the backlight with our lens, camera controls and LED's," he said. Light from the LED's is sent bouncing through a thin, wedge-shaped lens created by Adrian Travis, a member of the group.
"The LED's are programmed to send out the light in relation to where the head-tracking cameras say you are," he said.
The team is now working on a 240-hertz version with four beams of light, so that two people, for example, can watch 3-D shows. They will even be able to watch separate shows on the same television, he said, as the display steers one channel to one viewer and the other to the second. In the future, the same concept can be applied to games, he said, with each person having a private full-screen display.
Although the work is still in the early stages, Mr. Bathiche is looking forward to a commercial version of this device one day. Should that happen, fights over the remote may cease. "I can sit and watch sports," he said, "and my wife can watch opera."