March 01, 2000: D4D autostereo-monitor: best 3D ever and you can actually buy it

The D4D technology by the Technische Universität Dresden is around for some time now. It's latest incarnation, a fully digital 18 inch LCD-diplay with 1280x1024 resolution was presented at CeBIT.

The vertically interlaced stereo-image goes through a prism-mask which is alligned according to the users position provided by an eye-tracker on top of the screen. In later versions the eye-tracker will also be used to allow some limited headtracking for looking around objects.

Advantages:

- mouth watering stereo effect
- pixel-perfect images due to digital flat panel connection to the VGA-board
- knock-out sharpness at 640x1024 per eye
- no visible interlace lines
- incredible brightness - shutter- or polarization-based systems can't touch this
- lush colors
- no flicker whatsoever
- virtually no ghosting (!!!)
- supports stereo3d in any OpenGL application
- (headtracking for look around objects is announced)
- not just a lab-prototype - you can actually buy it

Drawbacks:

- no D3D universal stereo driver yet
- one user only
- user has to remain at a fixed distance to the screen - actually I had some trouble with this at first
- no full-res monoscopic mode ???
- 20,000 US$/EUR for the 18 inch digital version