P3D 3D impressions from SID 98 (3 of 3)

[roberts@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (John W Roberts)]

[Part 3 of 3: my opinions]

 S32.3: "An Eyeglass-Free Rear-Cross-Lenticular 3-D Display"
   (Mixed Reality Systems Laboratory, Yokohama, Japan)
 - Basically, a checkerboard pattern mask is placed over the backlight, then
   a vertical lenticular sheet, then a horizontal lenticular sheet, then
   the liquid crystal array. The display is free-viewed, with half of the
   spatial resolution going to each eye. The developers are working to
   reduce crosstalk, which they believe to be mainly a function of reflection
   in the optical layers.
 - I saw the demo for this display - a 1024x768 panel. I considered it to
   be very impressive - I tried to judge the apparent depth of the image
   but didn't notice any obvious limit. The photographs looked at least
   as good as those seen in a very good viewer, in terms of realism.
   The demo also included some graphics that appeared to float several
   inches above the screen.

(Also at the author interview session: a demo of a NuView 3D video camera
system. I didn't attend the session pertaining to it, but it looked good.) 

S48.2: "Slant Perception as a Function of Size Disparity and Image Motion"
 - It was noted that in real life people often see an object as different
   sizes in the two eyes, and at different relative positions with respect
   to more distant objects, as a result of location with respect to the
   two eyes. A series of experiments was conducted to determine how
   humans interpret various types of disparities in a stereo head mounted
   display, and the results shown.

S48.4: "The Effect of JPEG Coding Scheme on the Perceived Quality of 3-D
   Images" (Beijing Institute of Technology)
- I haven't had a chance to read the paper in any detail, to supplement
  the notes from the presentation. A test set-up is described in which
  various forms of JPEG coding and various levels of compression were
  used to compress 2D and stereo images shown to test subjects. The degree
  of perceived impairment of the image was plotted as a function of
  the degree of compression. The conclusion was the 3D images generally
  would tolerate a considerably higher degree of compression than the
  2D images, and that the perceived "depth and power" of the 3D images
  was not significantly hindered up to compression of around 50-80.

Conclusion: I was very impressed with the quality of 3D available through
digital media, the rapid advances being made in the field, and the level
of interest. I liked all of the 3D presentations and demos I saw.

[Again - my opinions and errors.]
John R


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