Mind Control

Mind Control
​

3D TVs have come and gone and VR, well if you don’t mind wearing a set of goggles, it can be effective for those who are not affected by motion sickness and visual disorientation, but there is another variety of 3D that is gaining popularity and does not need glasses, helmets, or anything unusual to view, although you will certainly not be sitting in your living room when watching it.  This form of 3D is becoming popular in China, although certainly not limited geographically, but at the moment its not for home use but rather for advertising, and is very effective at attracting attention.
The technology, loosely called naked eye 3D is based on a combination of hardware and software that is used to create short video advertisements on specialized massive LED displays found in public locations.  The LED displays themselves are huge, usually covering the face and side of a large building, a story or so above the street, but tend to be far denser than the usual ‘Time Square’- like advertising boards in terms of the number of LEDs.  Of course this makes for complex installations and very large numbers of smaller LEDs, making the projects expensive, but the advertising potential for these outdoor displays is quite high.
The technology is not just the hardware, as the image creation itself must be carefully controlled, but the techniques for creating naked eye 3D content are not a complex as one might think.   The most typical way to create depth in a flat image is by the use of occlusion relationships, such as superimposing lines in front and behind two identical images as shown in Fig. 2.  While nothing in the image has actually changed, our brain takes the lines as cues and we perceive the right image as being closer.  Unfortunately superimposing lines across video content is not an effective method for creating 3D content, but there are other ways to produce 3D on a 2D plane.

Occlusion Example - Source:Naked Eye pseudo 3D Display Technology Outside the Screen – Zyao Wang & Haikun Wei 2018 J Phys. Conf. Ser.1098 012013

Bezels, the outer, non-display part of many displays, are considered bad by most consumers.  Everybody wants bezel-less smartphones and TVs that make images look like they are floating in space, but bezels can be used to create 3D images in a 2D world by creating ‘virtual bezels’.  By creating a ‘virtual bezel’, essentially a black frame around a video image, our brains can again be fooled into thinking that images are ‘coming out of the screen’.  Here’s how that works:

Here’ is our tree again in a normal screen view, but if we ‘expand’ that black border, not physically, but as part of the video, we can create the same effect as superimposing lines might have.  Note that using the term bezel might be confusing here, as this is really a visual ‘bezel’ created during editing rather than a physical one, but you can see that by placing objects behind or in front of the ‘virtual bezel’, they can be made to look like they are in front of the display, rather than on a flat plane.

​There are other motion parallax techniques that can be used to enhance the realism of moving images, but as the pixel pitch (distance between each LED pixel) decreases in such displays, the realism increases and by bending the display around the corner of a building, the effect of depth is further increased.  Again these displays are all 2D in that they are flat in the same way a TV screen is flat, but the image does not look flat.  Most of the videos use less than the full screen in order to capitalize on the ‘virtual bezel’, which certainly works best at night, but we have seen compositions where the virtual bezel looked exactly like the side of the building, which made the imagery very effective during the day.  More to come.
Watch the short videos below to see this very unusual effect.
https://youtu.be/rScf4OocI7E
https://youtu.be/nWKtIGVPbyc
https://youtu.be/Gzw5240T6P8