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Sunday, April 24, 2011

3D without Glasses - How the Nintendo 3DS works


Nintendo's new 3DS is quite an impressive device. Unlike any of the other handheld gaming devices out on the market, the 3DS allows users to play games in 3D, without the glasses!

Nowadays, we know that to watch 3D, we have to wear those bulky glasses that sag over the face. However, the innovative 3DS uses a completely different technology to let the images burst out of the screen. The device uses what's called a parallax barrier LCD screen developed by Sharp. This technology has been around for a few years before but have never really been commercialised as the 3D effect is lost even at minutely differently viewing angles. However, on a small screen such as the DS where usually only one person is looking at the screen at a time, it does not pose a huge problem.

The 3D effect is achieved by the brain meshing up two different images sent to the left and right eye. Because the 3D glasses have different lenses for the left and right eyes, the 3D effect is achieved. What a 3D display does is that it uses an overlay over the LCD display that sends the different images to the different eyes. Thus, the screen acts as the 3D glasses.

Sharp's parallax display is basically a 3D display that can be turned off to display 2D images. For the more technical among us, here's a picture explaining further how the display works.

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