3D TV

It’s always a little sad to see a big consumer technology fail. But of course, the upside for us hacker types is that the resulting fire sale is often an excellent source for hardware that might otherwise be difficult to come by. The most recent arrival to the Island of Unwanted Consumer Tech is 3D TV. There was a brief period of time when the TV manufacturers had nearly convinced people that sitting in their living room wearing big dorky electronic glasses was a workable solution, but in the end we know how it really turned out.

Those same dorky glasses are now available for a fraction of their original price, and are ripe for hacking. [Kevin Koster] has been playing around with them, and he’s recently came up with a circuit that offers the wearer a unique view of the world. Any reflective surface will look as though it is radiating rainbows, which he admits doesn’t show up as well in still images, but looks cool enough that he thought it was worth putting the board into production in case anyone else wants in on the refraction action.

To explain how it works, we need to take a couple of steps back and look at the mechanics of the LCD panels used in these type of glasses. At the risk of oversimplification, one could say that LCDs are sort of like capacitors: when charged the crystals align themselves in such a way that the polarization of the light passing through is changed. Combined with an external polarization filter, this has the end result of turning the panel opaque. To put the crystals back in their original arrangement, and let the light pass through again, the LCD panel is shorted out in the same way you might discharge a capacitor.

What [Kevin] found was that if he slowly discharged the LCD panel rather than shorting it out completely, it would gradually fade out instead of immediately becoming transparent. His theory is that this partial polarization is what causes the rainbow effect, as the light that’s passing through to the wearers eyes is in a “twisted” state.

[Kevin] has provided all of the information necessary to build your own “Rainbow Adapter”, but you can also purchase a kit or assembled board from Tindie. If you’re looking for other projects to make use of those 3D glasses collecting dust, how about turning them into automatic sunglasses or having a go at curing your lazy eye.

Here’s some good news for all the fools who thought 3D TV was going to be the next big thing back in 2013. Researchers at MIT have developed a system that converts 2D video into 3D. The resulting 2D video can be played on an Oculus Rift, a Google Cardboard, or even that 3D TV sitting in the living room.

Right now, the system only works on 2D broadcasts of football, but this is merely a product of how the researchers solved this problem. The problem was first approached by looking at screencaps of the game FIFA 13. Using an analysis tool called PIX, the researchers both stored the display data and extracted the corresponding 3D map of the pitch, players, ball, and stadium. To generate 3D video of a 2D football broadcast, the system then looks at every frame of the 2D broadcast and searches for a 3D dataset that corresponds to the action on the field. This depth information is then added to the video feed, producing a 3D broadcast using only traditional 2D cameras.

Grab your red and blue filter shades and check out the product of their research below.

Continue reading “Converting Live 2D Video To 3D” →