Asus announced a couple of laptops with 3D screens (which don’t require glasses).
It’s a shame Apple continues to make it’s UI as flat, boring and depressing as possible, we finally have the technology to make the 3D effect of the OS and apps look amazing. However it will probably also never appear on a Mac while Tim Cook is CEO.
Edit: It also contains two cameras for eye tracking, which could be used for gesture tracking. Bringing us that one bit closer to interfaces we’ve seen in Iron Man and Minority report.
Asus’s own phones have a 1" gap between the center of it’s camera sensors, it’ll be interesting to see if that’s enough to be able to take two photos and display them in 3D on these laptops.
What most tech companies fail (or don’t care) to realize is that some features are not easily usable by many people (and I’m not talking about those who have obvious disablilities).
I for example, cannot see 3D displays… and have difficulty with tapping and swiping on touch screens. For that reason I have a 2020 iPhoneSE (the last with a physical home button)… my wifes iPhone12 is pretty much useless to me.
I have a New Nintendo 3DS that features a similar eye-tracking 3D technology. For those that can experience the effect, it’s pretty neat. Eye tracking was a huge step from “you have to line up your view just right.”
You don’t have to have inability to see 3D to not like the lack of a physical home button. My wife despises it and is hoping she can get an SE when she wears out her iPhone 11. For my part I have an iPhone 8 on its last legs and will probably go to an SE as a replacement. I don’t mind the buttonless design as much, but I’m used to it and I find the weird gestures needed to do things like switch or close apps to be annoying enough that I don’t want to figure them out.
Indeed; I suspect maybe even more than that. Loss of visual acuity and slower reflexes and poorer proprioception as one gets older work together to make touch devices problematic so as the average age of the population goes up I expect this to be more of a problem.
What is not explained is software compatibility or use cases.
It is a cool capability but I’m not sure what it costs or whether its utility justifies its cost.
If all those cameras could allow you to interact with the 3D image using your hands or at least hand gestures that might be cool but I don’t see how that would work without custom software.
Remember back in the 1960s everyone figured we’d all be using video phones by now but it never panned out? Or how companies have tried and failed for decades to make flying cars? It’s one thing to be able to do a thing, another thing to need to do it or for it to be practical.
For video calls, people aren’t always camera-ready, more than a few are camera-shy, and it’s much easier to multitask during a phone call without worrying about what the phone is aimed at or what your facial expressions are. So in practice the percent of calls that are video calls today are low single digits, even though most of us have FaceTime or something like it on our smartphones.
For flying cars, there are traffic control, training, licensing and security issues. If everyone were able to set down a car anyplace, what good would fences be? How secure would rooftops be? Do you want to blow your neighbor off his lawn chair with your prop wash when landing in front of your garage? So you’ll have to take off and land in designated areas anyway, and then you’ll need ways to control all that air traffic. No one ever discusses all these issues when selling stock in flying car companies. I wonder why?
For those of you who don’t like the gesture UI of the current phones, did you know that Android has the option to use a gesture style UI or the more classic means of navigating with fixed buttons? It kinda looks weird to see people with the latest phones, having fixed UI buttons, but it’s what they’re more comfortable with.
Which is what I see coming. It is part of the reason as to why I think this is a step in the evolution of computer interaction.
It’s often the case for some cutting edge tech. At the very least it can be used for 3D modelling right now, I’d imagine that with some work, stereoscopic photos and videos from smart phones, 3D games, and even the resurgence of 3D movies (mainly animation to start with).
If you recall the Steve Jobs era of Aqua, with all the 3D effects that looked awesome, while also benefited usability, these would look superb where the brain can be tricked even further into believing that there is depth. Often people using newer versions of the macOS can have a problem telling which window has focus for instance, having more depth would help alleviate that (but then again so would color and contrast).
I for one am really happy to see innovation in the computing space, I still think Apple would be able to pull this off in a more successful means as they have control of the complete stack (and used to have attention to detail), it’s just I believe the days of Apple doing “Cool” things are behind us now.
Not saying this couldnt be used that way but its not required to be used to gain that effect
As you note Aqua did it without a 3D display
The “flat” ui trend that has gained foot hold is, in and of itself, the reason people cant tell whats in front of what or whether a thing is a button or not Tognazzini remarked about it some time ago about how Apple has abandoned nearly all the HIG principles macOS was founded on for “design” or “cool aesthetics”
Fundamentally it started with iOS and has now infected every aspect of Apples UI designs
I think they are worse off for them TBH
I see. 3D modelling is huge, not just used in games, movies, but 3D CAD/CAM is used extensively for product design, shoes, clothes, packaging, electronics. etc, etc. Heck I bet even Apple’s hardware designers use some Windows boxes for 3D CAD/CAM of their products. Apple lost out on that market when they dropped NVIDIA. The #1 fashion design software performs terribly on even Apple’s top of the range Mac Studio.
Agreed, but I’d love to see it used this way, with all the depth effects feeling more real.
It is terrible IMHO.
Well… Lets face it, all of Apple’s products are an iPhone and iOS in one way or another. Virtually the same hardware, virtually the same software, what’s different is form factor, lipstick and API availability.
The 3DS doesn’t actually use eye tracking. It’s passive 3D. It renders 800x240, with alternating columns for each eye, so the effective resolution is 400x240. Then the screen has a sawtooth-like prism that projects even columns towards the left and odd columns towards the right. The slider on the side just affects in distance between the two in-game cameras, so when set to off, you essentially have pixel-doubled columns.
The New Nintendo 3DS does use eye tracking to maintain the illusion. That was one of the parts of it being the new version. I’ve had both devices, and the NN3DS is very impressive compared to the older ones where you had to sit perfectly still.
Oh I didn’t even realize it had something fundamentally different. I thought they just slapped an analog nub on it and called it new. Nintendo has had naming problems for years, so it doesn’t surprise me that I missed this fact, but I’m usually on top of these kinds of details.
