This weeks Cool Stuff Collective is now airing, also rather usefully it is now in full on the ITV player here so you can see the entire show (and a few recent ones) in their full glory. All those mad links that Sy Thomas does too 🙂 and that there is a storyline and plot for each show.
Monkey has turned into a pop impresario this week and is busy auditioning new acts, dressed with a white tshirt and high trousers…. Hmmmm I wonder who that is.
As part of the madness I have to audition for monkey singing Hello by Lionel Ritchie, it did not go well 🙂 We also had a rather tiring game of music gaming chairs. I must remember to lose more quickly!
The future tech section was rather exciting as it was a brand new type of 3D display from a Uk inventor. I actually found out about it during an impromptu conversation in Best Buy when I was getting our 3D TV, introductions were made producer Matt kicked into action and booked the tech on the show. As you know I like to let serendipity take its course and so we ended up with this screen on the show.
This screen is from Applied 3D technologies. It was a proof of concept prototype so had that wonderful mad inventor quality to it that I can totally relate to.
The screen had a circuit board doing some processing from an ordinary DVD player as the video source. The video on the DVD had been post processed for the screen format. The screen was not shutter or LCD glasses based, and it was also not the stereoscopic lenticular lens that we see on things like the 3DS. It was a different effect that I think is best compared to the sort of illusion of presence you get with the trick effects of a coin in a convex mirror bowl. The real coin appears to floating, you can reach out to grab it but really its at the bottom of the bowl out of the way.
The objects on the screen appeared to be in front of the plane of the screen not “in” the screen. Moving side to side the image would shift, still floating like on the inside of a sphere rather than with a lenticular where a shift to the right or left gives you a flat image.
We only had single objects rendered on a black background, but they were real filmed objects not just CGI. So there was motion. This made it seem a lot less plane related than many 3D films do.
Being an optical projection is also means it scales small and theoretically very large.
It was actually secret how it worked so I can’t actually say much more than form this observation, but it was intriguing to see and I look forward to seeing it go further. It was great to see the Cool Stuff Crew gathered around off air. As these people work with images all day, for them to be so interesting in something that felt and looked a little different proved to me there was something in this too.
All the contact details are on A3DT website if you are interested in finding out more.
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