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Lenovo is testing glasses-free computers with a ring controller.
www.theverge.comLenovo’s new ThinkBook 3D Laptop Concept and Hybrid Dimensional 34-inch Curved Monitor Concept, announced at Mobile World Congress 2025, use directional backlighting and head tracking to simultaneously show 2D and 3D content without glasses. An accompanying AI Ring concept can be worn to control them with gesture-based spatial controls.
It sounds like Leia’s tech, but Lenovo reps would not confirm during my short demo.
Maybe 3D is coming back? (I doubt it.)
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If a 3DS was able to pull this off flawlessly I’m pretty sure any potato laptop or phone can as well.
The challenge is the display and the software. There is no real contemporary stereoscopy support anymore beyond dedicated VR apps. Nvidia’s driver level support has been deprecated, I believe.
It couldn’t…it was highly dependent on viewing angle, both horizontal and vertical, it was really finicky to play 3D games without the 3D illusion dropping because you didn’t hold the device in the exactly correct position/angle. On top of that, the 3D looked weird like those old holographic 3D stickers you’d get in breakfast cereal and such. It was a fun gimmick, but it really didn’t work all that well.
As I said below I’m shocked to find out that people have forgotten that Nintendo iterated on the launch design with camera-driven eye tracking that pretty much solved that issue entirely.
Did people not mess around with the New 3DS at all? In my recollection it feels like it dominated most of the system’s lifespan. But then in my recollection I never ever turned off the 3D slider while the Internet is full of people that claim they never turned it up, so it seems the 3DS was used in very different ways by different people.
I’d guess many people never used a New 3DS. I got the original, was disappointed, and never thought about buying a new expensive one to fix the shortcomings of the old one.
Was it your first Nintendo handheld, then? Because man, is that their default play. I say, sitting on my pile of Game Boy Light, Game Boy Advance SP, Nintendo DSi, New Nintendo 3DS and Nintendo Switch OLED Editions.
But seriously, it works very well, it feels like magic and the bigger screen is also pretty good for how old and low-res it is. I have one sitting on my bedside table right now. If anything would sell me on a laptop using the same tech is the New 3DS.
I just don’t know that the PC ecosystem would have the software support for it.
No, but it was my last
Man, for a thing that sold 75 million units and ended up with a pretty great game library some people really latched on to being mad about it at launch and just never moved past that.
It may well be the console with the biggest gap between performance and performative negative opinion online ever. I would have said neck and neck with the PSP a few years ago, but it really feels like that got reassessed after the fact through emulation.
I’m not mad, I was simply disappointed enough by the original 3DS that I didn’t want to spend more money on a different version of it.
Is it somehow important to you that people like it?
Not particularly, but if we’re discussing the idea of bringing this display technology back I do have a vested interest in knee-jerk rejection of its use on the 3DS not misrepresenting the potential.
This is the absolute best way to do stereo 3D, at least for single user devices, it works and it’s built on well understood technology. I get that people were mad at the OG 3DS, mostly as part of a bit of a mob mentality memetic rejection of 3D TVs, but this is genuinely cool tech I would like to have access to again.
I only had the new 3DS, used it for many years. I messed around with the 3D functionality from time to time during these years but it was never good and never got rid of the two things I described.
Oh, now you are objectively incorrect.
I pulled mine out on the back of this thread (not hard, I have it on hand), just to reassure myself of how effective the eye tracking is. A level of Yoshi’s Wooly world later, I can say it only lost tracking when I started pacing around with it. While sitting or standing with it in my hands it was just a clean, solid 3D image, and it definitely beats having some polarized or shutter glasses on my face.
You are objectively incorrect. The tracking is better, yes, but the image is blurry when 3D is on. It’s definitely not clean and solid.
I will choose to believe my eyeballs on that count, but thanks for your contribution, I suppose?
This is a real issue with stereoscopy, in that it’s hard to talk about and there isn’t a guarantee that people’s perception of it is identical. Here, for example, I don’t know what you mean by “blurry”.
Potentially you could be talking about the ghosting effect you see when the lenses aren’t properly lined up with your eyes. I find that is entirely resolved by the eye tracking unless you’re moving the console around on the what, three different New 3DSs I have used for any length of time. I can’t guarantee something about your eyes or your 3DS isn’t different, though. I can only tell you I have a 3DS in front of me right now and I’m tilting it every which way and I see no ghosting as long as the camera gets line of sight to my face.
Or you could be talking about resolution. Because the way 3DS stereoscopy works is by angling alternate lines of pixels to each eye there is a horizontal resolution change on the display between 2D and 3D, although your brain should sort most of it out when overlapping the two images. I’m sitting here with a 3DS in front of me typing this and flipping the slider on and off and the image doesn’t lose any resolution to my eyes, it just goes deep. Can I promise that your brain is parsing the half-res-per-eye the same way mine does? I guess not.
All I can tell you is the effect is rock solid for me and I would take it on a tablet or laptop any day with no improvements (although I’d like to see how much further it can be pushed with modern tech). This is non-negotiable and the results of real life testing in real time right the heck now. Unfortunately for the same reason I can also not sit here and tell you that you aren’t seeing what you’re seeing. I can only report on what I see.
that is sad to hear. when it was coming in I just assumed it would be something eventually all cards had as standard.
Firstly the 3DS couldn’t pull it off. Secondly this is a completely different technology. Basically it’s just tracking your eyes and Parallax mapping the screen effects.
It’s still a 2D display in reality.
Yeah, no, the 3DS did eye tracking starting with the New 3DS.
Have people memory holed this? The New 3DS could adjust its parallax via eye tracking to a much wider effective tracking angle. It took a fraction of a second to adjust if you moved too quickly, but it was seamsless most of the time.
I have no idea what you mean. I’ve never heard of a new 3DS when did it come out?
Kinda nuts that this fell through the cracks for some people. The improvements to the stereo tracking were dramatic.
It’s rather telling though isn’t it that Nintendo then abandoned the technology as soon as they went over to their next console. If it had been popular they would have included it on the switch.
They abandoned many things when transitioning to the Switch. Most notably home consoles. I wouldn’t extract too many conclusions from that train of thought.
But yeah, I’m not saying the 3DS stereo display was hugely popular, even if the console itself did pretty well. Clearly a bunch of people were very hostile to it (and to every other variant of 3D display) right off the bat and never looked back. If the meme of “I switched the 3D slider down and never touched it again” popular at the time didn’t show that this thread seems to be good proof.
I’m saying people were extremely wrong about that and I’m surprised that the massive improvement in the New 3DS flew under the radar enough for some people to not even be aware that it happened. The tech absolutely works, and the two iterations Nintendo did absolutely show that it can be implemented very effectively for cheap.
im not sure how the 3ds did it but if this is what I think the screen will still require physical lines to work off of that will be so thing that they should barely be visible or assuming its done better two screens on top of each other where the first screen throws up the lines and could likely be something like eink.
I have no idea how it works I’m not sure if Lenovo have released that information.
It was at CEX but all the footage of it is mostly of people going “it’s really interesting but it doesn’t show up on camera”. So is anyone’s guess how good this will be.
I’m inclined to feel like it’s a gimmick though. Does anyone want 3D displays?