By Seán Captain
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I entered a conference room in Manhattan and a woman on the TV tossed a handful of rose petals out of the screen, where they floated in the air before my eyes.
At least, that's what I saw. In truth, the image resided on a perfectly flat, 42-inch LCD screen. But the 3-D illusion was fully believable, and I didn't have to wear a dorky set of polarizing glasses.
A new line of 3-D televisions by Philips uses the familiar trick of sending slightly different images to the left and right eyes -- mimicking our stereoscopic view of the real world. But where old-fashioned 3-D movies rely on the special glasses to block images meant for the other eye, Philips' WOWvx technology places tiny lenses over each of the millions of red, green and blue sub pixels that make up an LCD or plasma screen. The lenses cause each sub pixel to project light at one of nine angles fanning out in front of the display.
A processor in the TV generates nine slightly different views corresponding to the different angles. From almost any location, a viewer catches a different image in each eye.
Providing so many views is key to the dramatic results. Sharp Electronics makes an LCD display that projects just two views, requiring an audience to sit perfectly still in front of the screen. With the Philips technology, viewers can move around without losing much of the effect -- one set of left/right views slips into another, with just a slight double-vision effect in the transitions.
The TV can also display standard two-dimensional images, close to HD quality.
The uncanny 3-D illusion stops people in their tracks, as it's meant to. Philips is initially selling the 42-inch screens -- which debuted at the Society for Information Displays conference in June -- to retailers who will create 3-D ads to grab the attention of passing shoppers.
Casinos are interesting in the screens -- the mesmerizing effects may help patrons part with more of their money. Holland Casino just announced plans to install the screens throughout its locations in the Netherlands.
Finding content for home users is more of a challenge.
One nearly ready-made source of content is modern video games, which actually generate three-dimensional objects internally, then flatten the images into 2-D representations for standard monitors. Philips has developed hardware and software that can extract the original depth information from the game engine and use it to create 3-D images on a WOWvx display.
In New York, the company demonstrated the technique with the first-person shooter Call of Duty. It looked almost perfect, except for a little shimmering around the edges of objects, which Philips says will be fixed in the coming months.
The company also has plans for video. The ultimate hope is that studios will produce more 3-D content, like the recent 3-D version of Sony Pictures' Monster House that screened in 162 U.S. theaters. But Philips is developing software to convert standard video to 3-D by analyzing movement to determine the original depth position of people and objects.
A standard laptop running Philips' software was able to convert the DVD The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King into 3-D in real time and display it on Philips's new 20-inch "3D 4YOU" LCD monitor -- a retail-kiosk implementation of the 3-D screen.
The result looked vaguely 3-D, though it was marred by some blurriness and double images.
"I think for consumers this is simply not good enough," said Philips executive Rob de Vogel. "But the progress in the past year is amazing." He expects the company to show a better version of the conversion software to the public in the coming months -- possibly at the next Consumer Electronics Show in January 2007.
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