Glasses-free 3D on a Mobile 720p Screen, Cool

[WP_IMAGE]Glasses-free, 3D, full-motion video on a 4.3-inch screen looks pretty stunning.I didn’t get to watch the Captain America trailer long enough to see if the cell-matrix parallax barrier technology caused enough stress to bring on a headache. However, what I did see on an early prototype device was impressive full-motion 3D video on a 720p screen designed to work in a smartphone. MasterImage 3D and Chimei Innolux Corporation are partners in the demonstration glasses-free 3D technology on a 4.3″ smartphone screen.Company officials said the technology should go from the obviously early prototype seen here to production sometime in 2012.

Here are some things to keep in mind from an enterprise IT point of view when it comes to mobile 3D displays in tablets and phones.First, standards for measuring the accuracy of 3D display technologies are still emerging. There isn’t yet an established way to measure the quality of glasses-free 3D that can easily distinguish the performance of one type of screen technology from another. Thus, making a corporate standard recommendation for 3D devices based on quality and usability is still a ways off.Second, new applications will likely emerge with an unknown impact on network bandwidth. It wasn’t clear to me how much more information needs to be pushed over the wire or through the air to make 3D imaging work, but I’m assuming it’s more than standard video. And business applications that I can imagine, for example 3D medical imaging will likely tax both the network and the device processor.Third, user interface designs may begin to change that affect the way users access and use applications, including corporate apps. And the emergence of these interfaces on variety of mobile systems including tablets and smartphones will likely add a dimension (pardon the pun) of complexity to both application development (creating interfaces that work on both 2D and 3D devices) as well as IT operations (tracking user assets to determine display capability, for example.)I’ll be interested to see what the processing load and battery life are for running the new screen technology and 3D content on mobile devices. What I can say is that what I saw looked good and I don’t see displays staying at 2D for a much longer.