I recently had an idea for displaying VB-like 3-D images. This system of displaying these 3-D images is pretty basic, and it wouldn’t surprise me if someone else hasn’t already thought of this method. I call it the, “LINEAR STACK 3-D EFFECT,”
(cool name, huh?).

http://www.geocities.com/next_gen_virtualboy/Linear_Stack.html

Please reply to this post with questions/comments about this idea. All suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Thank You.

Post Edited (08-17-03 06:25)

This looks like a REALLY good idea :woah: This is so easy and good at the same time that someone MUST have thought about it. If not, patent it! 😀 Here are some thoughts that came to my mind when viewing the sheet:

➡ This system would “only” allow paralax-like 3D effects, no effective scaling or 3D images, just sprites on different layers.

➡ Would it need a lot of energy to display 5 or more LEDs at once?

➡ How big would you want the LEDs to be?

KR155E

i am impressed, please keep us all informated about this project..

KR155E,

Thank you for your questions/comments. “The LINEAR STACK 3-D EFFECT” doesn’t use ‘LED’ screens, it uses ‘LCD’ screens, like Game Boy Advance (which I don’t think put out as much power as an ‘LED’ screen).

I would want the screens to be the size of a Game Boy Advance screen, but not smaller than an original Game Boy’s screen.

This system of 3-D will be used for a handheld system, not a system like the VB.

I also think it’s a nice idea (in theory) but it’s slightly flawed, and not exactly new…

One of Mr. Yokoi’s other inventions, the “Game & Watch,” used an LCD sandwiched between a reflective background layer and a transparent foreground layer. Both of these layers had images printed on them, making a nice “parallax” effect such as you described. Granted, in your system there would be more, and they would be active, rather than fixed, but still a similar idea.

Also, unless you also go by “pmboy2000,” this guy thought of it, too: http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/3D_20Kube

As for using LCDs: Though I’m not 100% sure, since LCD’s use the polarity of light to decide whether the light is transmitted or blocked, I don’t think you can even stack LCDs. Even if you can, it would have to be the transmissive kind, not reflective like the GB(A) panels. Otherwise, not enough light would get to the reflector (and back out) to be able to see anything.

And since even the most expensive transmissive LCD passes much less than 50% of the light, this probably wouldn’t work, either.

However, there do exist so-called “holographic” displays which are transparent, but which don’t use polarization to achieve the image. While not yet (AFAIK) commercially available, they would not only allow this display technology, but also increase both the total number and visual quality of the layers, because:

A) They use an extremely thin refractive coating which can be placed on a similarly thin transparent sheet to achieve their effect, and:

B) They use laser interference rather than transparent metal electrodes to control the pixels.

I’d like to put some links here, but I can’t find any. It seems like I first read about it in Popular Science, though…

Anyway, I hope you can figure it out. It sounds really useful and (potentially) inexpensive.

As an aside, I recently found out that most LCDs polarize green light at one angle and red and blue light 90 degrees from that. Apparently, if you look at a green/magenta anaglyph (most anaglyphs are red/cyan) on an LCD (or an LCD image projected on a polarity-preserving screen) through glasses made of crossed polarized lenses, you can see in 3-D, but with much less cross-talk than with regular colored filters.

As soon as I can get some polarized filters, I’m going to try it on the GBA. If it works, I’m porting VB Wario Land! 😉

Later,
RunnerPack

Post Edited (08-23-03 06:22)