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Emerging Imaging Technology at CeBIT 2004
By Glen Speckert
April 26, 2004
(Emerging Imaging Technology at CeBIT 2004
: Page 1 of 1 )
CeBIT, the world's largest electronics show, occurs every spring in
Hannover, Germany, at the same Messe which hosted the World Fair at the
dawn of the new millennium. Companies from every corner of the world
come to the Fair Grounds to interact, interoperate, and impress future
generations of customers, collaborators, and competitors. There is
much to see distributed across 26 huge exposition halls, and I chose to
focus upon emerging imaging technologies, to extrapolate how they might
affect our future lifestyle.
3D Visual Interaction
The extension of human-computer interaction into the third dimension is
one area where there is a lot of innovation. The Fraunhofer Institute
Free2C 3D-Display is a silver stand-up kiosk, which waits for a user to walk into its viewing sweet spot, an area
about an arm's length in front of the screen. From this spot, the user
can see a stereo image without the use of special glasses or other
viewing devices. The LCD screen has a vertical reticular lens array
mounted to its front surface. The ridges in the lens align to columns
of pixels in the LCD, such that even columns of the image are aimed at
one eye, and the odd columns at the other. The display is bright and
high resolution. As long as the user remains in the sweet spot, the
perception of stereo is good.
The kiosk has eye-level cameras which track the user's head and eye
locations. When a user steps in front of the kiosk, it "locks on" to
the head and eye positions. The kiosk twists the LCD screen/lens
combination as the user shifts left or right, keeping the sweet spot of
stereo perception on the user while they remain in front of the kiosk.
The cameras are also used to recognize hand gestures as the user
interacts with virtual 3D controls.
This approach to stereo vision has one drawback. While the objects
appear in the 3D space between the user and the kiosk, the image of the
object is on the LCD screen.
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