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Friday, February 25, 2011

POP IMS, from France, creates an Interesting Abstract on new Lenticular A3D Technology

In a comment below in this blog under the Blog entry on A3D Companies, Frank GUIGAN writes:


"Hello,
We are a European R&D team working on 3D technologies.
We think we have found the best autostereoscopic technology, especially for tablets and phones.
You will find at

http://www.popimslab.com/public/Popims_3D_Video.pdf 
a complete information on this subject.
We hope you will find it of interest.
Cheers,
Franck GUIGAN / Popims / www.popims.com "


If you are interested in lenticular display technology, it is a good read. Please discuss.

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

An Explanation of How Lenticular, Autostereoscopic Video Works (Using Pictures)

Autostereoscopic 3D (A3D)means seeing 3D on a TV without the need to wear 3D glasses. There are several ways to achieve this, and one way (the focus of this post) is by using a lenticular lens. We will also use a video format that is referred to as 9-view in the A3D industry.

Hardware
You can put a lenticular lens over any size monitor, but you definitely want to get a high-quality LCD with at least 1080p resolution.

A company I produce A3D content for, APCO AudioVisual, rents 22", 32", 42", 46" and 57" A3D monitors.

For example, you start with an HD (1080p) LCD monitor, say we have a 42" one. Next thing you do is get a 42" lenticular lens from a company like this or this. You mount the lenticular lens over the LCD monitor and you're ready to focus on the software aspect.

Software
The first thing you need to do is get 3d footage from either 3d modelling software (like Maya or 3ds Max) or from a 3d camera.

Although it's not perfect, nor is it easy, you can convert 3d camera (2-view) footage to n-view footage.

So within your 3d modelling software, you use a plug-in, which is 9 cameras, side-by-side, all pointing to a single object.

For example, I used a 3D model of a DNA strand and placed it in front of a 2D video of water splashing, which I mapped onto a plane behind the DNA.

With that said, consider this: A3D monitors appear as if things can float about 15" in front of them and 15" back "within" them.

I put the 2D video of the water on a plane that should appear about 15" back "within" the monitor. I put the 3D model of DNA so that it would appear to be about 15" in front of the monitor.

Here are the 9 images of the same frame exported from the 9-view plugin from within 3ds max. (I compressed each image from TGA to JPG to make them more web-friendly).

Camera One
 Camera Two

 Camera Three



 Camera Four




 Camera Five




 Camera Six




 Camera Seven





 Camera Eight




 Camera Nine




For each frame of video, the Display Configurator reads in each of the 9 views, then outputs a single image. For the above images, the Display Configurator gives us this image:


It's kind of hard to see what's going on, so here's the same image as above, except the background is removed:


When the above image is shown on the LCD monitor, as it passes through the lenticular lens, it would appear to an observer as if it was floating in front of the monitor.