Sharp Announces Mobile 3D/2D Touchscreen

Sharp's 3D/2D mobile touchscreen display goes official.

Friday Sharp Japan officially revealed the world's first mobile 3D/2D touchscreen display that will not require 3D glasses. As we reported over the past week, the new technology uses a parallax barrier system to display three-dimensional images on a small form-factor screen.

"This parallax barrier, which has a series of vertical slits, is incorporated into an ordinary LCD to control the path of light reaching the right and left eyes, thus creating a sense of depth," the company explained in a press release. "However, the conventional 3D LCD with this system had difficulty in displaying high-quality images in 3D mode."

Sharp's new switchable 2D/3D display will also be used in Nintendo's upcoming 3DS handheld gaming platform.

As for the specs, the mobile display is roughly 3.4-inches in size and features a native 480 x 854 resolution (FWVGA). Akihabara News also added that it will have a 1000:1 contrast ratio and a 500 cd/m2 brightness in 2D Mode. The display will be extremely slim and almost void of any ghosting (although still not prefect).

When the tech was linked to the 3DS, many were concerned that the effect would be ruined when viewing the display at certain angles. Akihabara's hands-on experience with the tech on Friday called it "impressive" and "mind-blowing."

"Not only the colors and brightness are good as advertised, but also the 3D Ghost-less Effect on this LCD is really impressive," the site reports. "Sharp did something really impressive that will probably compete with the 3D Shutter glasses technology of Panasonic and Sony."

But the screen does have its drawbacks. Although most of the ghosting has been eliminated, viewers are required to remain in a "sweet spot" in order to achieve the full 3D effect. Image depth isn't quite as defined as shutter-based 3D options, providing "a great sensation of depth without making you feel as if the image is coming out from the screen."

Based on Friday's information, the resulting images appear to be similar in nature to those created by Fisher-Price's View-Master toy, fooling the eyes by placing two images together to create a sense of depth and possible object emergence.

Sharp said that it plans to take the technology a step further by allowing users to shoot images and video in 3D mode.