You may well remember that I did a blog post a few weeks ago, about how Sharp are bringing the 3D revolution to mobile phones. I talked about how they’d be using a parallax barrier screen, so you didn’t need to wear the silly glasses, and make yourself look a numpty. Oh, and Sharp said they’d also put a 3D camera in there, as well.
Well, according to Engadget, those things have now come to pass, because Sharp have unveiled their first, prototype 3D-enabled phone. And yes, as per the title, it does include a 3D screen, and it’s got a built-in 3D camera (which amount to it having two cameras on the back, as you can see in the piccie on this post). I gotta say, I’m really digging that infinity symbol around the camera, too.
However, is it actually any good? Weeeeell, apparently, the camera’s not that brilliant (as they say, a grainy image, in 3D, is still a grainy image), and the video looks a bit grainy, but the 3D part of the equation palpably does work, and I suspect that’s the important part, here. After all, Sharp can fix things like image resolution and so on, but the whole thing’d be a complete non-starter if the 3D didn’t work as advertised.
Well, the good news is that it does. 3D looks, well, 3-dimensional on the built-in screen, but the cool bit is that you can output 3D images and videos to a TV, using the HDMI port, where they’re viewable using the silly glasses.
Here’s the thing, though: I’m not convinced the 3D revolution is all that revolutionary. It’s still, in my mind, something of a pointless gimmick, but that may be because I never got round to seeing Avatar, and that opinion may change after I’ve seen Tron: Legacy. But in terms of mobile phones, I’m having trouble seeing why 3D is such a big deal. I mean look at something like the Samsung Galaxy S; it doesn’t need 3D gimmickry to be brilliant, does it?
Plus, I can remember those rulers that used the same optical principles as Sharp’s 3D screens use, and I can imagine that trying to keep your head in one position, to see a true 3D image on the phone, will quite frankly be a pain in the botty. Now if it was 3D “holographic” interfaces they were talking about, like what R2-D2 produced in Star Wars, well then I’d be properly excited.
Of course, if that happened, you just know nerds round the world would set their ringtone to be “Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope”…
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