I wouldn’t blame you if you hear the phrase “3D laptop screen” and roll your eyes. I doubted this too.
But I experienced two demos of these 3D laptop screens at CES 2023, and I was completely blown away by how impressive the technology was. My first experience with it was an actual gaming demo in the Acer Predator Helios 300 gaming laptop.
The technology is called Spatial Vision and it comes from a company called Dimenko. Using the eye-tracking cameras in the laptop’s top bezel, the system can accurately follow your face to create a complete 3D image of you. That means no headset and no 3D glasses.
Acer has been experimenting with this over the past few years in a few models, and it seems to be finally approaching a point of maturity. But that’s not the demo that really sold me on the tech.
At Asus’s CES booth, the company showed me an example of a 3D display that really caught my attention. Asus has integrated a 3D screen into the ProArt Studiobook 16 OLED — it’s also coming to a cheaper Vivobook model — and in the demo, it’s paired with a stylus from zSpace. Using a third camera connected to the laptop via USB-C, it can track my use of the stylus in 3D space. In other words, I can now interact with these virtual objects in 3D space.
Demos were simple. In one, I was just a fluttering butterfly or moving around some leaves in a jungle environment. In the medical use case, I could inspect a virtual heart, looking at the arteries and rotating it in 3D space. To be honest, I have no idea how practical any of this stuff is, but the technology itself is stellar.
The quality of the performances was a big reason why it was so compelling. The ProArt Studiobook 16 has a 3.2K OLED screen with a 120Hz refresh rate, which means that environments and 3D objects were sharp and smooth, regardless of where they were brought before my eyes. The more lifelike animation and resolution goes a long way towards selling your mind on the idea that what you’re seeing is real – at least it is for me.
In a world that’s failed to sell people on strapping headsets and glasses to their faces, the mixed-reality potential of 3D displays like this gets me really excited for the technology — especially some more practical use cases. after being developed.
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