Anyone over a certain age will remember 3D glasses. Well, alright, actually kids might know 3D glasses, as well, since the Doctor wore them in an episode of Doctor Who. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, them little bits of cardboard with red and blue sweet wrappers embedded in them. Oh, how the world has changed.
Incidentally, did anyone else try to replicate the same effect by sellotaping Quality Street wrappers over their eyes, or was that just me…?
But I digress…
3D is the big buzzword in cinema at the moment, with more and more films coming out that exploit the format. Oh, and let’s not forget, 3D will get its biggest push yet, when James Cameron’s Avatar hits the screens. But even in the modern high-tech world, you still need the modern high-tech equivalent of those cardboard glasses. Well, apparently, according to Pocket Lint, not if you’re using Nokia’s new 3D screen technology, because it lets you view 3D images without looking like a complete tool.
Apparently, the new screen tech actually lets the naked eye see things on screen with an actual 3D depth of field.
And I’m not sure how it works…
Y’see, the whole idea of depth perception comes from us having binocular vision. Our individual eyes see the world from a slightly different angle, thus rendering it 3-dimensional. 3D pictures, with the silly cardboard glasses, work by showing each eye a slightly different image (which is why, when you look at them without glasses, they look like two images, one blue, one red, superimposed on top of each other). Modern 3D cinema works on a similar principle, but polarises the light reflected off the screen to, in essence, let your eyes see two different images again.
Nokia’s new handheld version must use what’s called autostereoscopy. And might possibly use lenticular lenses (y’know, like you got on them rulers when you were at school, where the picture changed depending on what angle you were viewing it at) or parallax barriers. But since I only actually know what what the first one is, I’ll just go “ooooooooooooooooooooh, magic” and we’ll leave it at that.
Certainly could be interesting to see, anyhow. A future version of the Nokia 5530, for example, where the screen actually lets you view things in a 3d field, could be rather intriguing to use, giving the interface a sort of pseudo-3rd-dimension to the scrolling.
Of course, it’ll still all be done on a 2D screen, so functionally it might not change the game too much.
But it could certainly look prettier…
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