| Editor's Note |
| The plot thickens.
Earlier this week we learned that Samsung was warning of potential health hazards associated with watching 3-D TV. Now comes word that university researchers have already been sounding the alarm, saying visual disparities in 3-D TV images can cause viewers to experience physical strain. The villain here is something called vergence-accommodation conflict, which describes the breakdown of the typical coupling between the distance to which eyes converge and accommodate focus. Put simply, this means the human brain can have trouble processing images which are projected on a screen in 3-D.
More troubling is that, according to the researchers, the more real a scene strives to be, the more pronounced this effect becomes. The researchers say the effect is less pronounced when viewing animation in 3-D, because the human brain has lower expectations for animations. This is the sort of problem Alice might encounter in Wonderland. Considering that many in the electronics and entertainment industries have been marketing 3-D TV for its realism, this is a potential hornet's nest.
Perhaps most troubling of all is that the researchers say vergence-accommodation conflict can be minimized by cinematographers shooting scenes in certain ways, with the potential health hazards in mind. In the wake of a long and bitter debate over medical care in the U.S., colored by rhetoric about who is most qualified to be making decisions regarding people's health, there is one thing both sides would likely agree on: it's not cinematographers. These people are paid to present films in the most artful and visually appealing ways imaginable. It's a good bet that few if any have had any medical training. It would be a stretch to entrust cinematographers to develop expertise in optometry, or things called binocular disparity and linear-perspective disparity.
Years ago, virtual reality was killed for the consumer market because the technology was not able to accurately reproduce all the visual cues necessary to make a head-mounted display (HMD) work without sickening at least some viewers. While 3-D TV has sidestepped the problem by eliminating the HMD, the long-term effect on the brain of depriving it of the visual cues it expects is unknown.
Bottom line: more research is needed here to understand these health hazards and what percentage of viewers will be affected by them. With 3-D TVs already on the market, the fear is that consumers will become the guinea pigs in this experiment. But it may well be that fundamentally new technology is needed to mitigate the issues. Or it could be—aghast—that the human brain is simply not equipped to watch 3-D displays for prolonged periods of time. In any case, 3-D TV will never be ready for prime time unless the technology gets a clean bill of health.
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| Top Stories |
3-D TV disparities said to cause physical, mental strain
Visual disparities in 3-D TV images can cause physical strain in viewers, according to recent research.
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Opinion: 3-D TV can't make your kids sick. . . can it?
In almost all cases, factors that influence eye strain, nausea or headache in 3-D viewing are neither 3-D displays nor 3-D glasses. But they are [related to] content creation, post-production and mastering processes used in 3-D video production. Here's a three-step plan to prevent 3-D disaster.
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| Semiconductor News |
Reports: Google buys chip design firm Agnilux
Google Inc. is following Apple into the IC design business by buying a chip design team company, according to reports. Google has bought Agnilux Inc. (San Jose, Calif.), which was formed by former design engineers who had been brought into Apple and then quit to form their own company.
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Numonyx 1-Gbit phase-change memory delayed
Nonvolatile memory maker Numonyx BV (Geneva, Switzerland), the company being acquired by Micron Technology Inc., has yet to sample customers with a long-awaited 1-Gbit capacity phase-change memory. The indications from Numonyx are that samples will be available in 2010 with volume production expected in 2011.
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Report: South Korea, UAE expand semi cooperation
South Korea and the United Arab Emirates discussed ways to expand their cooperation in the semiconductor sector, according to a report by South Korea's Yonhap News Agency, citing South Korea's Ministry of Knowledge Economy.
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| Business News |
Altera's sales, profit surge
Programmable logic vendor Altera reported a net income of $153.2 million on record sales of $402.3 million for the first quarter, beating consensus analyst expectations for the period.
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SEMI book-to-bill down slightly for March
North American semiconductor equipment manufacturers posted a book-to-bill ratio of 1.19 on a three-month average basis in March, meaning $119 of orders was received for every $100 worth of product billed, according to the trade group SEMI.
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Sales, profits surge in Apple's latest quarter
Apple Inc. reported results of its last three months, its best non-holiday quarter to date with revenue of $13.50 billion and net profit of $3.07 billion compared to revenue of $9.08 billion and net quarterly profit of $1.62 billion in the same period last year.
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Cree posts record sales, profit
Light-emitting diode maker Cree reported record sales of $234.1 million for the quarter ended March 28, up 17 percent sequentially and up 78 percent year-to-year.
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Seagate erases fiscal Q3 loss on demand boost
Seagate Technology Inc. improved its operating performance in the fiscal third quarter with net income of $518 million versus net loss of $275 million as revenue jumped 42 percent from the comparable year-ago quarter.
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ISuppli lifts forecast for PV installations
Market research firm iSuppli dramatically increased its 2010 forecast for installations of photovoltaic systems, citing an expected surge in sales in Germany combined with plunging prices.
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| Design News |
Japan's STARC joins IPL Alliance
The Interoperable PDK Libraries (IPL) Alliance has gained another new member: Japan's Semiconductor Technology Academic Research Center (STARC).
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Mirics launches TV decoding on GPU
Mirics Semiconductor Ltd. (Fleet, England) has announced the launch of a multi-standard broadcast TV decoder that uses a Cuda-based graphics add-in-card for computational acceleration.
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TSMC stresses automotive embedded flash qualifications
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (Hsinchu, Taiwan) claims to have shipped nearly 600,000 200-mm diameter wafers containing 0.25-micron AEC-Q100 qualified embedded flash ICs.
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| Technology News |
Kyoto Prize winner shares 'enchanted' quest for blue LED
Isamu Akasaki's pioneering work on gallium nitride nucleation on sapphire substrates opened the door to the blue LEDs and blue lasers used today in everything from DVD players to solid-state lighting, earning him the 2009 Kyoto Prize for Advanced Technology. He will tell the tale of his decade-long quest at the Kyoto Prize Symposium.
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| ESC Silicon Valley |
ESC: Tech experts deliver no fluff, all substance
Technical experts from Freescale, Micrium, Green Hills Software and more will answer questions at the Embedded Systems Conference and ESC Expo.
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| Product News |
Numonyx launches serial-interface phase-change memory
Nonvolatile memory maker Numonyx BV (Geneva, Switzerland), has announced the Omneo range of NOR-compatible phase-change memories.
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Micron sampling 2-Gb, LPDDR2 for mobile devices
Micron Technology said it is sampling a monolithic 2-gigabit low-power DDR2 memory chip designed to provide mobile products, such as smartphones and smartbooks, with improved battery life and speedier system performance.
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| Course: From FPGA to ASIC |
| There are two reasons for migrating from FPGAs to ASICs, and many more reasons why that migration could easily go astray. The Fundamentals of FPGA-to-ASIC conversion presents the principles and the tools available to do it right, including a real-world example using Altera's HardCopy ASICs.
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Dylan McGrath is editor of the EE Times Newsletter, which brings you the latest semiconductor and design news.
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