Digging deep into 3D Smartphones - Do they really work?

Most, or at-least some of the best 3D smartphones you can ditch your glasses and still watch the 3D effect on your mobile phone. These smartphones have a layer in front of the screen that allows visualization of Stereographic 3D images. The layer is comprised of parallax barriers, a series of tiny slits that helps each eye to view different sets of pixels.

However, you really have to make sure that you are positioned exactly in front of your phone’s screen for optimal 3D experience. Changing the angle slightly will not just affect the 3D quality but will make the image look a lot blurry causing a bad experience and strain to the eyes at the same time. With this constraint, watching a 1 minute video clip could be an awesome experience but I don’t think that it is easy to maintain the right angle throughout a video clip that lasts for about 5 minutes; and how about watching full length DVD movies - Not possible unless you put the phone on a dock or yourself! That is certainly a downside of the technology.

Moreover, sharing with the next person could well already be a big problem given the very limited viewing angle. If I want to watch a cool video simultaneously with the another person, it is impossible that both of us get the optimal quality; the uncertainty principle with Physics applies here.

But if we want to talk about perks - Not just viewing 3D videos and pictures, you can also shoot them in 3D. HTC’s Evo 3, a follow-up to Sprint Nextel’s breakout smartphone allows users to capture 3D pictures and videos using the couple of cameras in the back of the phone. Another show-stopper is LG’s Thrill 4G for AT&T. However, in spite of the ability to view and shoot 3D entities, when it comes to applications or usability, it all seems to be a gimmick. How do we share all the nice stuff? For now we cannot share 3D images or videos in Twitter, Facebook or Flickr the leading websites where all the crowd likes to hang out. But there is YouTube 3D for the rescue.

Unless the 3D technology occupies all areas, it is hard to enjoy the complete functionality of these phones. If you are a standalone person, you can enjoy much with your phone. But, the world today is more towards sharing and making friends; that is how Twitter and Facebook are popular. So without making it possible for sharing all the cool features, 3D technology cannot become our future. But changes will happen soon, as everyone strongly hopes because it won’t be good for Twitter and Facebook to lose people without giving them this feature.

It is a 50-50 when it comes to opinion of the crowd. Some say that these phones will rock the future. Some say that these phones are packed with useless features, mostly causing a headache rather than giving a great experience. But whatever be it we have to embrace the innovative technology and give it a go to see where it takes us! It could be a gimmick now. The point is we are not yet there, but we will be there soon. Well, James Cameroon has already started to worry that people would illegally shoot movies in 3D in the theaters!