back to article Sony designs 360° 3D TV

With so many firms jumping on the 3D TV bandwagon, Sony has obviously felt compelled to push the envelope further still. So it has developed a 360° 3D display. Confused by the term? You shouldn’t be, because the prototype display is essentially a tube-shaped unit able to show a 3D image to anyone looking at it from – …

COMMENTS

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  1. Daniel 1

    "Sony's 360° 3D display could be used for videocalls"

    I really cannot remember the last time I took a video call from an animated yellow cartoon dog. (are Sony saying that they've managed to get Microsoft Bob running on the thing).

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    cool !!

    +1 sony

  3. Matthew 17

    Fail

    No-one wanted 3D TV/Cinema in the 80's when it was new, why does anyone think they will now?

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Go

    Rotating LCD?

    I guess this is a slab of LCD possibly at a 45 degree angle rotating rapidly inside the tube? If so, they are not the first to take this approach. I have seen it done with lasers bounced off of a spinning mirror in the past.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    3d videophone?

    How would you get a suitable input image?

  6. Wind Farmer
    WTF?

    120xTri-nitron-Degrees?

    After telling us we needer a flatter, squarer tube, they've only gone and mucked it up......

  7. pedrodude

    Regardless of whether it's really 360°...

    ...It's still a nifty piece of industrial design. Even if it is just a limited viewing angle led screen wrapped around a pole.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @Matthew 17

    Errr...The 80s!! You must be crazy...Try the 20s The development of 3d tv stopped in the 70s and has only really started to become mainstream again. Imagine if we hadn't have had that huge development gap We'd all be enjoying Cheryl Cole on xfactor a hell of alot more than we already do!

  9. edwardecl
    Thumb Up

    Pretty awesome...

    I don't think anyone is going to use with as a TV... just imagine a 50" version... of this how much of the room would it take up.

    But think of the other applications...

    You could have an animated fish aquarium and crap like that great for the gadget shop ^^.

    But I don't want to know how expensive this will be :(.

  10. Bernie 2
    Pint

    the point being?

    has anyone ever said "this new 40" set is great but I can't seem to see the picture when I'm standing behind it, I wish it had a 360 degree viewing angle"?

    Are there families who would place their TV in the middle of a room and then all sit around it in a circle if only it were technically possible? Wouldn't wanna visit their place for dinner

  11. Jan 13 Silver badge
    Headmaster

    @Matthew 17 AND the AC who responded

    The 20's to 80s technology that you're thinking of is stereoscopy.

    It's true that Sony isn't the first to try 3D moving images, but it is very recent technology.

    Previously only still image holograms (1960s technology) could do 3D.

    Steroscopy gives an illusion of depth by showing different 2D images to each eye.

    Stereoscopy has a single point of view and a single (optimum) viewing distance.

    A 3D image gives the illusion of both depth and parallax, even if you only use one eye.

    3D images change when you change your point of view or viewing distance.

    I'd like to see this scaled up at least 20 times:)

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    POV

    I expect its a spinning 2d array of LEDs which turn on and off at the right time.

  13. Psymon

    @rotating LCD

    I saw that laser/rotating mirror configuration too.

    I suspect that is not the case with this device. Sony should be all too aware that a display device with huge moving parts such as that are destined to failiure.

    Don't forget the lesson learnt with John Logie Baird Vs. Philo Fanrsworth. Mechanical TV was never going to take off.

    Pre-empting pedantry: Yes, the race between the two technologies was ended prematurely when Bairds half of Crystal Palace burnt down, but by that point it was a forgone conclusion the the EMI-Marconi system was superior in every respect.

  14. James O'Shea Silver badge
    Paris Hilton

    thinking too small

    y'all are thinking too small. If they can get this to be _true_ 360 3D, so that a viewer can see different angles of the object depending on where he is (and I say 'he' with malice aforethought) and if they can bring the costs of actually producing such content down to a reasonable level, then the porn industry will have lots of fun with it. 360 degree 3D rumpy-pumpy!

    Shortly after that George Lucas will re-release the Star Wars movies in 360 3D WrapAround You-Are-There-Vision. i feel a disturbance in the Force...

    And then there'll be Halo 3D from Your Friends at Microsoft.

    Paris for obvious reasons.

  15. Tony Humphreys
    Coat

    A little late?

    Wasnt there a video game in the 90's that tried to do this? Cant remember what it was called though some 3 inch high chick would (appear to) stand on a glass panel.

  16. Anthony Shortland
    Thumb Up

    @A little late

    Yes there was an arcade game like this - I was going to post the same thing.

    No idea how it worked but I remember being extremely impressed at the time. No idea why the technology didnt catch on.

  17. Christian Berger

    Moving OLED

    It wouldn't work with LCDs as they are _far_ to slow for that. For a little toy mechanical scanning television would work, after all the Japaneese also made the home VTR reliable which is also scanning it's images.

    It's probably OLED as that's a cheap and fairly evergy efficient technology.

    There's of course also the possibility for real holographic television. For this you'd needed an image sensor and a reflective display of about the same size. Both would need pixels no larger than a few micrometers, ideally only a few nanometers.

    Now on the transmitter you take a laser beam, widen it, split it into 2 parts. You let one be reflected by the object and let the other get to your image sensor directly. On the sensor a interference pattern will appear.

    Now on the reciever you let a widened laser beam shine on your reflective display (scale the wavelength if it's not the same size as the transmitting sensor). It will reflect on the spots you previously had constructive interference at. Those spots would create a new waveform just like the original one.

    It's simple in principle, but it's hard to get terapixel sensors and displays.

  18. LuMan
    Pint

    @ '@Matthew17' AND 'A Little Late'

    "We'd all be enjoying Cheryl Cole on xfactor a hell of alot more than we already do!" - yeah, I was enjoying Cheryl Cole right up to the point the talentless bint opened her damn mouth to sing! I'd rather listen to Simon Cowell recite the phone book. In Brum!

    The video game was called Time Traveler and was marketed as the World's First Holographic Game (or something). It was done by the same bloke who did Dragon's Lair (Rick Dyer - I think) and used a big curved mirror and a TV screen behind some smoked glass. There was a spin-off IIRC which was like Barbarian, but not as good.

  19. Stef 1
    Go

    Tony Humphreys / Anthony Shortland

    Sega's Time Traveler

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Traveler_(video_game)

    For your reading pleasure.

  20. Christian Berger

    Better guess

    I now guess that it's an OLED display with a lens array in front of it so the image is only visible from a narrow range of directions. That way you could display a different image for each direction. You could also easily feed it from cameras. Either by putting dozends of cameras around your subject or by putting fewer cameras and interpolating.

  21. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    3D TV needs pr0n

    Without the porn industry on-board, 3D TV will never succeed.

    Once there's a load of boobs and arse to view in 3D then it'll take off and be a worthy investment.

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