|
After a decade of development at Sharp Laboratories of Europe
Ltd. (Oxford, England) (www.sharp.co.uk),
its 2D/3D LCD technology is ready to go. Last fall at CEATEC,
Sharp exhibited about 10 test versions of 3-D LCDs. The sizes
range from 3.5 inches (PDA) to 15 inches for notebook PCs and
TVs, and images appear stereoscopic at a distance of 70cm. Sharp
started mass production of this panel in October, and plans called
for commercialization of the product at the end of 2002.
The company will initially produce several tens of thousands of
LCDs a month, before raising output to 500,000 units a month by
the end of next March. The price of the LCD will be held to just
about 20% more than that of a simple TFT-LCD after mass production.
 |
Sharp's development focuses on
hardware as well as software to provide an integrated product.
It is setting up a new businesses model based on a judgment
that a conventional models offering only hardware is not sufficient
to accelerate the launch of the 3-D display market.
Also, for this purpose, and to increase the content available
for 3-D displays, Sharp intends to build cooperative relationships
and alliances with companies in a wide range of industries,
including hardware, software and content, and establish a
consortium to provide a development environment for content
providers. The consortium will invite members from the network
industry, such as Internet Service Providers and carriers,
in order to promote information exchange. Sharp also might
license the technology to help expand the 3-D LCD market.
|
Thirteen companies have expressed interest in joining the 3-D
consortium, including Microsoft, the Japanese unit of Eastman
Kodak, Sony, Toshiba, Sanyo, Fuji Photo Film, Olympus, NTT data
and Imagica.
To create a 3-D display, Sharp developed a structure that generates
parallax for the viewer, thus generating separate right eye and
left eye images - without special glasses. To realize this, the
company developed a special parallax barrier device that is placed
between the backlight and a standard TFT-LCD panel. This allows
the technology to be applied to LCD displays at a variety of sizes.
The first to be commercialized will be small panels for cell phones
(see related article).
The parallax barrier is constructed using a switching liquid crystal,
polarizing film and a polymer liquid crystal layer - all in direct
contact with a standard image-generating LCD panel. Light from
the backlight passes through the first polarizer and is rotated
by 45 degrees as it passes through the switching LCD. On the surface
of the retardation film, a polymer liquid crystal is formed as
a stripe coating and then processed so that the orientation will
change by 90 degrees from one another. As a result, when light
passes through the retardation film and then the polarizer on
the back plane of the TFT-LCD, it comes out in a striped pattern
of vertical slits.
These slits alternate between opaque and transparent. By displaying
the image intended for the left eye and the image for the right
eye as a stereographic pair on a TFT-LCD, the light path is controlled
by the slits so that slightly different images reach the left
and right eyes. Each eye sees only the image intended for it,
and the brain combines the images and perceives them as a 3-D
representation.
The horizontal resolution of the displayed is cut in half when
operating as a 3-D auto-stereoscopic display. But the opaque slits
in the parallax barrier are turned transparent (no 45 degree rotation
applied in switching LCD), then the display has full resolution
and acts as a normal 2-D display.
This is not the first time that the parallax barrier method has
been applied to a 3-D display, as other have tried to use an LCD
capable of displaying black and white stripes, combined with an
ordinary image-creating LCD. However, this combined LCD poses
a problem since a slit cannot be positioned close enough together,
creating image problems. Sharp's innovation is to create the slits
very close to the pixels of the image-creating LCD, thus greatly
improving image quality. The approach also allows viewers to be
closer to the display, within 30cm, and still see the 3D effect.
In addition, the construction creates thinner displays that will
be brighter.
Alternatively, the conventional lenticular method also allows
for 3-D display without glasses, but it does not offer an easy
way of switching between 2-D (planar) and 3-D (stereo). It also
provides more chances of crosstalk (causing image overlapping)
than the parallax barrier method. As a result, it is difficult
to achieve high-quality images based on the lenticular method.
Until now, the 3-D display market has been perceived as a niche
market, mainly because a product dedicated to 3-D display could
not be used in ordinary applications, and thus was regarded as
a special unit. Moreover, most 3-D products require special viewing
glasses, which is inconvenient for consumers.
Sharp Laboratories, Grant Bourhill, grant.bourhill@sharp.co.uk
GET
OUR NEWS ALERTS
FREE SAMPLE
OF MICRODISPLAY REPORT
|
