MasterImage Eyes New Customers

Autostereoscopic 3D Barriers Will Linger 3-5 Years, Mitsubishi Says

April 26, 2010 by Jeff Berman|Top News

UNIVERSAL CITY, Calif. -- The main barriers to making glasses-free, autostereoscopic 3D work for home entertainment will linger for three to five years, David Naranjo, Mitsubishi’s director of product development, predicted at the 3D Gaming Summit. Challenges posed by the current need to use special glasses to view 3D content include a lack of interoperable glasses to work with different brands of 3D TVs (CED April 23 p2).

But Naranjo told Consumer Electronics Daily there are “too many downsides” to autostereoscopic solutions, starting with its higher costs and the inability to see 3D effects in many cases when viewing off-axis. The price of a 46-inch LCD display compatible with stereoscopic 3D would be about half that of an autostereoscopic 3D display of the same size, Naranjo said. And “off-angle viewing is very bad,” he said.

The only major display maker that had supplied autostereoscopic 3D displays, Philips, exited the category last year, Naranjo said. That happened when Philips closed its 3D Solutions division (CED April 3/09 p1). But Sharp has been working on an autostereoscopic 3D solution that uses parallax barrier technology. The system is expect to be used in the coming Nintendo 3DS handheld system that will achieve 3D effects without requiring the use of special glasses (CED March 25 p1). Off-axis viewing tends not to be much of a problem on small-screen displays such as mobile phones.

It’s “too early to say” when the cost of making autostereoscopic 3D displays will come down significantly, James Bower, MasterImage 3D’s president, told us at the conference. He called off-axis viewing an “existing challenge.” MasterImage developed autostereoscopic 3D display technology that Hitachi has used on a mobile phone, the Wooo, in Japan, Bower said. His company developed a “unique assembly process” in which a barrier is built directly into any kind of display panel, he said. The left and right images are “weaved” together to create a 3D effect, he said. Cost hasn’t been much of an issue for MasterImage, Bower said, saying his company had been able to maintain a “very high yield,” helping to keep costs “very low.” It costs “less than $20” to put the technology in a cellphone, he said.

MasterImage is “working with many of the other handset manufacturers,” Bower said, declining to identify any. He predicted that his company’s technology will be used around the world starting in 2011. There are “no limits to the types of devices” that can use the technology, he said. MasterImage’s “main focus” is on displays smaller than 19 inches, but larger displays are “in development,” he said. Bower said he sees the mobile phone market as especially attractive because many consumers replace their devices every 12-18 months, much faster than TVs. There isn’t much of a market for 3D in mobile phones, he said, but that business “will catch up and be part of the 3D movement over the next couple of years."

3D Gaming Summit Notebook…

About 350 people attended the first 3D Gaming Summit, said a spokeswoman for conference manager Unicomm. That’s fewer than the 600 or so people who attended the company’s 3D Entertainment Summit in September, also at the Hilton Los Angeles/Universal City. But the 3D Entertainment Summit has been held each year since 2008 and attendance at the first 3D Gaming Summit was stronger than at the first 3D Entertainment Summit, she said. Conference Chairman Bob Dowling said he was “very happy” with last week’s turnout, calling it strong “for a first event.” Another 3D Entertainment Summit will be Sept. 15-16 and there are plans for a 3D Gaming Summit sometime next spring, he said. The events will probably be at the same location, he said.

Conference speakers said 3D gaming needs a “killer app” in the form of a game to do for it what Avatar did for 3D movies. The success of stereoscopic 3D in gaming will largely come down to whether there’s strong content, RealD President Josh Greer said in a keynote Friday. Many speakers called Avatar the yardstick for 3D movie quality, but Greer said How To Train Your Dragon used the technology better than any film has.

Stereoscopic 3D is “kind of a novelty,” Sherry Gunther, the CEO of online kids entertainment company Masher Media, said. But eventually gamers will view nonstereoscopic 3D games as outdated, much the way gamers see 2D games now.

"From a marketing standpoint, the worst thing” for the game industry to do is offer “too many choices” of home 3D solutions, said Josh Wexler, president of Threshold Animation Studios. Like many others at the conference, he expressed concern about the lack of compatibility among 3D glasses from different manufacturers. But Lorne Lanning, chief creative officer at OddMobb, said “you can’t argue with the need for competition,” because when only a small number of companies are making a product, innovation tends to be stifled.

Facebook is the largest customer of mobile payment company Zong, Hill Ferguson, Zong’s vice president of product management and marketing, told us. Its payment system is used on about 130 wireless carriers in more than 30 countries, he said. About 1.5 billion consumers have access to pay using Zong’s system, he said. Other Zong customers include Gaia Online, IMVU and Playdom, he said, telling us his company had “hundreds” of online-merchant customers and more than 20 million end users.