Demo: Mobile Phone Display with Glasses-Free 3D

Japanese mobile phone operator NTT Docomo has used the Expo Comm Wireless Japan 2010 trade show to demonstrate this new prototype 3D display for portable devices that won't require users to wear glasses.

It's likely that the Nintendo 3DS will be the first widely-available product to have a 3D screen that doesn't need glasses, and it's likely that mobile phones will quickly follow suit.  There are even signs that competition is on its way, because the one shown here is made by Epson, but Sharp will be supplying Nintendo's.

Epson's new display has a native resolution of 1028 x 768 pixels, which when displaying 3D pictures via a lenticular layer (rather than the parallax barrier used by Nintendo) gives a resolution of 320 x 240 pixels per frame.  That's because the screen actually displays eight different viewpoints at once.

The only problem with this very, very early prototype is that, according to NTT Docomo, it can't yet show an image in ... two dimensions.

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