Sharp

3D without the goggles

Back in October Sharp announced its 3D notebook, the Sharp Actius RD3D, the world’s first 3D notebook. At the time, I wasn’t sure what to think about the technology, it certainly sounded cool, but after seeing countless 3D products fail I was skeptical but highly curious. When Sharp contacted me asking if I would be interested in meeting, I was definitely interested.

Actually, it’s a funny story, the day before I met with executives from Sharp, I saw a demo Actius RD3D system up and running in NVIDIA’s booth (the wall of notebooks in one of the pictures). It was obviously the only system with a 3D display, so it naturally stuck out, but it was also the only laptop NVIDIA featured that was powered by a GeForce4 Go GPU. Needless to say, after seeing it in NVIDIA’s booth, I wasn’t impressed.

Sharp's Actius RD3D

Therefore, when I sat behind the controls of Sharp’s own Actius RD3D notebook, I was pretty surprised when the images jumped out of the screen, they’d accomplished real 3D!

If you refer back to Sharp’s original PR, the end of the press release mentions “when centered in front of the display, each eye receives the correct visual information for the brain to process” with the emphasis being that you must be in the sweet spot for your eyes to process the “3D” image properly. Tilting your head by just a few inches can take you out of that sweet spot, this is something Sharp is currently working on for the consumer version of the Actius RD3D, which will go by the designation RD3D-R. The current Actius RD3D is intended for CAD and medical imaging applications.

This technology has already taken off in Japan, where over 1.5 million 3D cellphones have been sold. Because you can control the environment on a laptop, Sharp first introduced this technology into notebooks, but next year they plan to unveil standalone 3D monitor displays in addition to the RD3D-R. Besides Sharp, other key partners include Sanyo and Sony.

Sharp had a go-kart racing game in their suite (I can’t remember the game’s name) as well as a few other applications. It was actually a much better technology demonstrator than the programs NVIDIA were running in their suite, although the high frame rates made it easier to lose focus. Twitch games such as Quake 1 and to a lesser extent, Quake 3 would probably be more difficult to get used too, while a flight simulator would be a natural fit for this technology.

Sharp and NVIDIA are working closely to convert titles to 3D. Already they have notable titles such as Quake 2, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3, and James Bond 007: Nightfire, ported, with the Need for Speed and Tiger Woods Golf franchises signed up. They’re actively working on adding more titles to that list, and eventually end users will be able to rate the quality of the conversions at www.sharp3d.com, so you can avoid the titles that aren’t converted well. Other consumer applications include photography (Sharp has developed its own photo viewing software, Smart Stereo Photo Editor) and of course, movies.

You can control the level of immersion via the driver control panel, so if you really want the images to pop out of the screen they can. You can also toggle between 2D and 3D at the touch of a button.

The Actius RD3D ships with a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 processor, 512MB of DDR SDRAM, a 15” XGA monitor, 60GB hard drive, DVD/-R/-RW/RAM &CD-R/RW drive, 10/100 Ethernet, and 56K modem. The system weighs 10.2 pounds and retails for $2,999.