Medicine, laptops and the web get their Avatar moment

Avatar might have had a bad night at the Oscars, but it’s done nothing to slow the flow of 3D technology. Early adopters can even now pick up an Acer Aspire 5738DZG laptop complete with the requisite glasses from Amazon for £546.43 including delivery.

As with so many technologies there’s more than one way of achieving the same end. With 3D media that means tricking a user’s eyes by delivering a slightly different image to each one, a technique known as “stereoscopy”.

Acer, which claims to have created the world’s first 3D laptop, uses software to split the display into alternate horizontal lines. Using the polarising glasses included with the computer the viewer sees depth in games or movies. Or that’s the theory.

The advantage of Acer’s approach is that this technique isn’t restricted to specially created 3D material. That’s just as well given that there are only a couple of 3D movies slated for DVD release this year. And, as Acer’s opted to keep the price of the snappily titled Aspire 5738DZG low, it doesn’t include a Blu-ray player.

As far as the effectiveness of the software-created 3D effect is concerned reports are at best mixed. It seems to work best with games while with movies the results are generally fairly limited. Generally it’s seen as a bit of a gimmick, although the same criticism has been levelled against 3D visualisation since British scientist and inventor of the concertina Sir Charles Wheatstone started experimenting with a device for displaying 3D images in 1840.

But it’s not just the entertainment industry that’s currently developing uses for 3D visualisation. Aberdeen University is using a similar technique to Acer’s laptop for teaching medical students.] Its Medi-CAL Unit is creating stereoscopic images almost instantly from standard scans. It’s a technique which could be extended from teaching into more general medical use.

At the same time researchers at Germany’s Saarland University have developed a 3D version of the Firefox web browser which could be released by Easter. At the giant digital industry trade show CeBIT in Hannover at the beginning of March a demonstration showed a Wikipedia entry for Venice complete with a 3D tour of the Palazzo Contarini del Bovolo. There’s a video of the demonstration on YouTube.

The German researchers are not alone in attempting to develop 3D for the web. Google is competing with its O3D project while Mozilla has WebGL. The difference is the Germans have created a system which is an extension of the HTML programming language used for all web pages rather than being a separate technology. This means it can used by web designers without them needing to learn a new programming language.

They weren’t the only ones demonstrating 3D at CeBIT with all the major television manufacturers offering 3D in one form or another. This Wednesday March 10 Panasonic will start selling 3D TVs at Best Buy in New York, although iPhone-style queues round the block aren’t expected.

Wait a bit longer and maybe you’ll be able to have the 3D experience without the silly glasses. Sunny Ocean Studios in Singapore has developed a system which creates the illusion minus the spectacles. That isn’t new. Existing methods create a focused 3D illusion for just one person. Sunny Ocean claims to have overcome the problem so an image will appear in 3D from many angles.

Related posts:

1. Omens not good for the why-Pad So Apple has finally unveiled its supersized iPhone or, more...
2. Google takes a big swipe at Microsoft Office Google has launched what is widely seen as a full...