3D – still not 3D enough
Why am I thinking 3D? I just tried out BMW’s Z4 “3D” app, which uses your webcam to do some clever augmented reality. If you haven’t tried it, and have 5 minutes and printer handy, try it now, go on, you won’t regret it.
The buzz on screen tech is as follows: it’s going 3D. James Cameron a few years ago (not long after Titanic) stated that EVERY film he made from them on would be shot to be 3D-ready, he believed in it so heartily. Back then we thought “yeah, right, hold the coloured plastic glasses, we can do without it”.
But now it seems like all things digital are going to jump out of the screen at you.
So, firstly, how? Capturing is a bit more technical, but the real question is, will viewing it work for us? 3D is still generally delivered in two ways:
- Without glasses: this involves using (expensive) lenses or technology on the screen itself. Leads to nausea apparently…
- With glasses: this involves either separately coloured lenses, polarized lenses, or lenses that “blink” about 60 times a second so the image only gets to one eye at a time. Leads to, you guessed it, nausea apparently…
Nausea aside, the “blinking” glasses win at the moment as screen technology is still far too expensive: in fact 3D giant Nvidia is selling the glasses right now for $199, and by all accounts it kind of works, as long as you have a decent screen. I’ve tried something similar to Nvidia’s product, and yes, it kind of works. But only kind of.
So what’s missing? The real issue is that this is not 3D. This is 3D within a screen. That’s not how 3D works for our brains. The real 3D is all around us, and if we reach out, we can touch it.
And getting that sort of 3D means only one thing: plugging into our brains. The tipping point with user interface technology is this: once we can plug into brains, we can do away with everything else. We can chuck mice, keyboards, 3D glasses away. We simply won’t need them – because it will all be there, on demand, in our brains.
Pretty Girls Make Graves Good Health mp3 album
Until then, this tech site alongside videophones on the “keep trying” list - although the BMW Z4 example is pretty great example of augmented reality.
