Philips 3D Solutions provides end-to-end 3D system solutions ranging from 3D displays, 3D content creation and conversion tools and technology licensing. By expanding its 3D Display product portfolio with the 52” 3D Display, Philips is responding to developments in the signage market towards more diversity in display sizes. Jos Swillens, CEO of Philips 3D Solutions: “With our new 52-inch 3D display in the portfolio, we can offer the pro-AV and digital signage market an even higher degree of immersion and a more exciting 3D viewing experience. Our broad range of 3D display product – in combination with our full range of content creation tools and our licensing program – makes us a true end-to-end 3D system solution provider”.

The 52-inch auto-stereoscopic 3D Display is based on a full HD (1920×1080) LCD panel, offering full brightness (700 cd/m2), full contrast (2000:1) and a response time of 8 ms. The WOWvx technology uses the 2D-plus-Depth format including Declipse, which gives additional occlusion information for a real 3D ‘look around’ effect. The 52-inch 3D Display will be commercially available from Q4 2008 onwards

Philips will demonstrate the 52-inch 3D Display, along with a full range of other 3D Display and content products at the Philips 3D Solutions booth C1519 in Central Hall 1 of the Las Vegas Convention Center at InfoComm 2008, from June 18-20 in Las Vegas, USA.

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Forget hi-def TV. That technology is as old as the internet. The next generation of digital entertainment could bring entertainers into your living room as full-sized 3D holograms, bring cell phone voicemails to life with tiny images of callers or bring you face-to-face with Super Mario himself.

It’s an exciting time for physicists and other researchers who have spent decades trying to expand the applications of holography, the creation and manipulation of 3D images made by bouncing laser light around.

Last month, a team of researchers at the University of Arizona unveiled a critical breakthrough toward the elusive goal of holographic video, developing a technology that allows holograms to be rewritable for the first time. This allows 3D images to be changed many times per second, just like the frames in a movie.

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Jill Smart, an Accenture executive, was skeptical the first time she stepped into her firm’s new videoconferencing room in Chicago for a meeting with a group of colleagues in London. But the videoconferencing technology, known as telepresence, delivered an experience so lifelike, Ms. Smart recalled, that “10 minutes into it, you forget you are not in the room with them.”

Accenture, a technology consulting firm, has installed 13 of the videoconferencing rooms at its offices around the world and plans to have an additional 22 operating before the end of the year.

Accenture figures its consultants used virtual meetings to avoid 240 international trips and 120 domestic flights in May alone, for an annual saving of millions of dollars and countless hours of wearying travel for its workers.

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TiVo, the Silicon Valley company that introduced millions to the joy of skipping television commercials, is trying to crack a decades-old media dream. It wants to turn the television remote control into a tool for buying the products being advertised and promoted on commercials and talk shows.

The company, based in Alviso, Calif., will introduce a “product purchase” feature on Tuesday in partnership with the Internet retailer Amazon.com. Owners of TiVo video recorders will see, in TiVo’s various onscreen menus, links to buy products like CDs, DVDs and books that guests are promoting on talk shows like “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” “The Late Show With David Letterman” and “The Daily Show.”

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The $350,000 scientific display device and its twin backscreen projectors are packed with software designed to impart three-dimensional form and even “feel” to virtual objects, whether a string of molecules seeming to swirl in mid-air, a hovering swath of DNA, or a simulated diseased organ about to be removed.

The 3D objects - which leap off the screen with such forcefulness that first-time observers often flinch or hop backward - can be manipulated to perform flip-flops and other twists and turns. It’s illusion, sure, but not just the scientific version of a parlor trick. The virtual forms enable researchers to scrutinize things they would not be able to easily view or handle otherwise.

“You can go deep into the structure of a chemical, an organism, or even a natural event,” said Zupan. “It is getting interest from researchers into everything from particle physics to how a caterpillar locomotes.”

The 8-foot high by 14-foot wide screen at the Tufts Center for Scientific Visualization, funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation and built by the Illinois firm Visbox Inc, is among the most sophisticated such devices in use on any US campus. Boston University and Brown University also have visualization systems, but the Tufts model uses an advanced German-designed filter to sift out “ghost” images and is equipped with twin projectors - as opposed to multiple projectors - for smoother images.

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Let’s get this out of the way first — in the next 10 years, no one will travel to work by jet pack or have robot maids that serve dinner. But technology will continue to transform the rituals of everyday life — sometimes in startling ways.

Imagine televisions that project 3-D images into the middle of the living room, for a theater-in-the-round experience. And while we won’t get those robot maids, our appliances might start “talking” to us through email alerts, letting us know when a part is getting worn down and needs to be replaced.

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This story is not a prophesy. It is not a prediction. Nor is it a prescriptive.

This story is a warning.

Reality is changing. Cheap, widely distributed bandwidth and advanced networking technologies are divorcing an ever-growing segment of the population from traditionally “real” constraints like geography and socio-economic status.

At work, your closest colleagues could be sitting in the next cubicle…or on the next continent. Cutting-edge simulation techniques will soon bridge even the visual divides, making you feel like you’re sitting across the table from someone thousands of miles away. Millions of people are already choosing what “reality” they inhabit.

At the moment, online multiplayer games are the most dramatic example of these constructed realities. According to economist Edward Castronova, at least 10 million people worldwide subscribe to an online world like World of Warcraft, Star Wars Galaxies or WWII Online. While the vast majority of these worlds are centered around a videogame (kill the dragon, blow up the Death Star, shoot the Nazis), people are doing far more than just “playing” in them. They are making friends, discussing the weather and politics, getting (virtually) married, even making real money.

How “real” are these places? Plenty—at least to the people who live in them. According to Castronova’s book, Synthetic Worlds, fully 20% of the people who subscribe to EverQuest, a pioneering online game from Sony, consider its virtual world to be where they “live.” They travel elsewhere “occasionally.”

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If you ever participated to some virtual reality (VR) experiments, you know that the environment is quite expensive and not always user-friendly. In fact, in some immersive environments, it’s even possible to feel bad because of motion sickness. This is why researchers from Germany and Sweden have developed a new VR environment where the participants believe they’re moving while being seated. This approach, which relies on visual and auditory illusions, could lead to commercial low-cost VR simulators in the near future.

Here is the introduction of this IST Results article.

Creating close to real-life virtual reality (VR) experiences has proven to be costly and has had rather poor results. In response, a European research team has explored how exploiting visual and auditory illusions can possibly lead to low-cost virtual reality simulators of the future.

So the goal of the POEMS project (short for “Perceptually Oriented Ego — Motion Simulation”) was to move the environment instead of moving the persons. And the researchers presented their prototype at the 8th Annual International Workshop on Presence which was held in London in September 2005.

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Developed by the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute, the Tactical Language Training Program is different from interactive language programs of the past, which focus solely on spoken language. In Tactical Iraqi, players navigate a set of real-life scenarios by learning a set of Arabic phrases, culturally relevant gestures and taboos. Other titles include Tactical Levantine and Tactical Pashto.

Following each lesson, the player is asked to interact with other characters using speech and gestures, while a speech-recognition system records and evaluates the responses. Accurate responses allow the soldier to build a rapport with other characters and advance to the next level.

The Army and Marine Corps have trained about 300 soldiers using the system, says Lewis Johnson of USC’s Information Sciences Institute. Some of them traveled to Iraq with the game to continue their own training and share the knowledge with other troops. Johnson expects several thousand soldiers will have used the game by the end of the year.

Misunderstanding nonverbal cues such as proximity while speaking, handshakes and subtle gestures like bowing the head or placing one’s hand over the heart can create or destroy trust, says Hannes Vilhjalmsson, the project’s technical director. “There is a whole sequence of things that has to happen in connection with what you are saying, and it’s that kind of rich context of interaction that we are trying to re-create in the virtual environment,” he says.

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