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Techradar |
- In Depth: Is 3D TV and gaming a health risk?
- In Depth: Top 10 best social apps for OS X
- Review: Lenco SB-100
- Review: PSB Image 5.1
- In Depth: How 3D video chat and sound is shaping up
- Review: LG BD670
| In Depth: Is 3D TV and gaming a health risk? Posted: 21 Aug 2011 01:00 AM PDT The Daily Mail reported on 5 May this year that: "Half an hour after seeing the film Alice in Wonderland in 3D, Josh James blacked out on his way home and rolled his car. Could 3D have been to blame?" James certainly thinks so, and many newspapers seem to share his opinion. In recent months we've been bombarded with alarming stories about 3D, from tales of 3D monitors and movies damaging our eyesight to The Sun's claims that some Nintendo 3DS users "even reported seeing web pages in 3D after switching from the console to a PC." With manufacturers' own safety warnings suggesting pregnant women, children and drinkers should avoid the technology, it's no wonder that some people are concerned. But is there any substance behind the scares, or are people seeing problems that aren't really there? Screen-related scares like these are nothing new, and sometimes there's real substance to people's concerns. For example, the advice that you shouldn't sit too close to the TV dates back to May 1967, when General Electric admitted that poor shielding meant some of its TV sets emitted dangerously high levels of X-ray radiation. As Time magazine reported, "Because the radiation was directed downwards, [Public Health Service] officials noted that most viewers would probably not be harmed. But they worried about children sitting on the floor near TV sets placed on tables or shelves. X-rays shooting through vents in the bottom of such sets could produce serious eye damage within an hour." The problem was fixed 44 years ago, but we're still warning children about sitting too close to screens today - although our focus has shifted to concerns about our children developing 'square eyes' from televisions, computer monitors and games consoles. Sitting too close to any screen for too long can certainly cause eyestrain, but it doesn't do any permanent damage. It won't make a child myopic (short-sighted), but a child who is developing myopia may well start sitting closer to the screen so he or she can see it better. That leads to understandable confusion between causation and correlation: sitting too close was a symptom of the problem, not the cause of it. Could the same confusion be happening with 3D? What the papers say
According to The Sun, the 3D effect in Nintendo's 3DS has made lots of gamers ill. "Fans besieged gadget websites and Twitter to complain of dizziness, headaches and sickness after playing the hand-held device for just a few minutes," it reported. According to the Daily Mail, "Studies show that in up to 20 per cent of viewers, [3D] could even induce physical sickness," while Fox News claimed that "From Hollywood studios to Japanese TV makers, powerful business interests are betting 3D will be the future of entertainment, despite a major drawback: it makes millions of people uncomfortable or sick." Fox News claims that these problems affect one in four viewers; the Daily Mail, one in five; The Sun, "thousands" of "furious gamers". Is any of this actually true? The short answer is no. The Sun's claim that thousands of goggle-eyed 3DS owners returned their handheld consoles was quickly debunked by Nintendo and our sister magazine T3, which discovered that GAME had received just five complaints, and that Nintendo's return rates were actually lower than with previous launches. Fox News eventually admitted that its one in four figure came from an "unscientific, online survey" that didn't find 3D made one in four people sick; it found that one in four people who filled out the survey had felt "uncomfortable or sick". That's a big difference. The Daily Mail story was based on a single study of just 39 people, none of whom were actually sick. It's clear that some exaggeration is happening, but that doesn't mean 3D doesn't cause problems. It can, and it does. A dangerous dimension?
There are three key concerns about 3D. The first is that it could make you ill, causing symptoms like severe headaches, fatigue and nausea. The second is that it could cause disorientation, leading to events like Josh James' car crash. The third concern is that it could damage children's vision. Of the three, there's no doubt that the first and second concerns are valid; we can get the same symptoms from simply looking at 2D displays, reading books and staring through car windscreens at the road ahead. Focusing on a single point for too long fatigues the eye muscles and causes eyestrain. Its symptoms can include headaches, dizziness, carsickness, light-headedness, nausea, blurred or double vision and concentration problems. The disorientation Josh James described sounds like a particularly severe case of such strain, but while it was unpleasant and dangerous for him, such symptoms are very rare. The main factors in eyestrain are the length of exposure and the distance from the screen, but another factor can be the refresh rate of the screen you're looking at. Some people are sensitive to low refresh rates in 2D as well as 3D, and if they're wearing a set of 120Hz active 3D glasses then they're experiencing 60 flashes per second per eye as the glasses' lenses darken and brighten. Faster glasses with a higher refresh rate can help to reduce the effect. Another factor could be the nature of 3D itself, as Larry Benjamin, Chair of the Education Committee for the Royal College of Ophthalmologists, explains. "The main principle of 3D imaging is to send one view of a picture to your left eye and a different view of the same scene to the right, which your visual cortex will then put together as a perception of an object with depth," he says. It's a trick, but it doesn't work on everyone. "Approximately 2-3 per cent of the population can't see 3D because of early onset squint, or an eye problem that develops later in life - and you need good vision in both eyes to be able to see 3D," Benjamin says. "This is because the vision in each eye is slightly different. You can test this by looking at the same object with one eye covered and then looking at it with the other eye covered - the image shifts very slightly. The theory is that this helps us judge depth and distance better." Remember the Daily Mail story? If you go digging, you can find the study it was based on: Measuring Visual Fatigue and Visual Discomfort Associated with 3D Displays. The study found that for people with good binocular vision (GBS), 3D didn't cause any problems at all. However, people with moderate binocular vision (MBS) "are more susceptible to visual complaints associated with stereoscopic displays." A later study by the same authors, An Exploration of the Initial Effects of Stereoscopic Displays on Optometric Parameters, concludes: "When healthy adult subjects with normal binocular vision viewed text images at 3-metres in extreme 3D display settings for a short period of time there were no clinically significant mean changes in optometric test variables compared with 2D viewing." Of all the potential problems with 3D, this is the big one. If your binocular vision isn't perfect, 3D images may appear blurry - and that will soon have you reaching for the Nurofen. But that's as bad as it gets. As Larry Benjamin puts it: "You cannot damage your eyes by watching a 3D film, but if you spend an excessive period of time doing so, you may get a slight headache because of eyestrain."
Many of the tabloid scares have quoted professor Martin Banks, head of the University of California Berkley Visual Space Perception Laboratory, but his tone is very different to the papers'. "There are some issues to worry about, but in my opinion the most plausible ones concern people feeling bad, not having their health somehow adversely affected," he told us. Banks argues that the way we focus on 3D images can, in some cases, cause discomfort to people using 3D screens. "The issue we know the most about is the so-called vergence-accommodation effect. Vergence is the way we direct our eyes to fixate a point in space. We converge our eyes to look at something near and diverge to see something far. Accommodation is the focusing response of the eyes. We change the shape of the lens inside the eye to bring images into sharp focus on the retinas." With 3D, we're asking our eyes and brains to do strange things. "In the real world, the distances to which the eyes must converge and accommodate are the same, so those responses are coupled in the brain," Banks says. "With stereo 3D displays (S3D), the eyes must converge to the distance of the content (sometimes in front of the screen, sometimes at the screen, sometimes behind) while always focusing at the screen where the light is coming from. This requires the brain to converge and accommodate at two different distances, and this is known to cause some discomfort, fatigue, and occasionally headache." The good news is that not everybody suffers from the problem of eye strain. The bad news is that the younger you are and the closer to the screen you are, the more likely you are to encounter an issue. "The problem decreases with age such that it's not an issue with 50-year olds or older," says Banks. "The problem also decreases with viewing distance. Thus, video gaming is indeed a prime target for problems due to this conflict because the viewing distance is short and the typical user is young." Lying eyes
Dr Stephen Hicks of Oxford University's Department of Clinical Neurosciences thinks that any permanent effects are highly unlikely. "Permanent changes to the visual system are very difficult to make," he says. For example, "Squint and amblyopia are common deficits in vision in children, where a weaker eye disrupts ordinary binocular vision. A common treatment is to patch the strong eye in order to encourage greater strength in the weaker one. This can require several hours of patching per day, sometimes for several months. This is a dedicated process that corrects a very slight defect - to produce an irregular mode of sight is likely to take orders of magnitude longer, and still may have no permanent effect." Dr Hicks describes a well-known visual experiment, the inverted vision experiment, where "people discovered that if you put glasses on that flip the world upside down, you find things very difficult to do at first - but after a day or so, people report that the world seems the right way up again. The brain recodes the visual information to keep it in sync with your body and environment. When you take the glasses off, the world is again upside down and takes a short time - this time only about an hour or so - to correct itself." As Dr Hicks explains, with 3D, "this suggests that any temporary changes that occur to your visual system as it adapts to even regular 3D movie or TV watching will be rapidly reset by a short period in the real world." What about gaming, where a suitably involving game can keep you engrossed and immediately in front of a 3D screen for long periods? "It's possible that after several hours of exposure, the sense of depth will be slightly inaccurate. The difference here is that a video game is a consistent single point of view; there is rarely much editing and as such the effect is stronger, but also less fatiguing." Our own anecdotal experiences of 3D suggest that there is some difference between two- and three-dimensional entertainment: we've found 3D quite tiring for adults and children alike, especially when it's 3D of the fast-edit, look-it's-coming-right-at-you variety. "Many people have outlined reasons why 3D is more tiring than 2D, from poor quality glasses with grubby plastic, to lower light levels caused by polarised lenses, or the discord between apparent depth and focus - everything is in focus in 3D - but the arguments I find most convincing refer to the poor use of 3D by film-makers themselves," Dr Hicks says. "Every time we see a new 3D scene, we may be forced to reinterpret the world's depth. This can be exhausting if the director has chosen rapid edits, as they often do, which are tiring for children without the added burden of altered visual convergence." It's not technology, but the way it's used - which explains why subtle 3D like that used in Toy Story 3 isn't as tiring to watch as an action film that's been given a speedy 3D makeover in postproduction. "Over time this will be improved at the cinema," Dr Hicks predicts, "but I don't see 3D TV ever becoming consistent in depth. Think about what happens when a 3D ad comes on, and all of a sudden things are flying around in all sorts of eye-popping ways." Thumbs up for 3D?
Rather than ruining our eyes, it seems that 3D might in fact be a useful tool for optometrists. That's the position of the American Optometric Association, which suggests that "3D viewing may actually help uncover subtle disorders that, left uncorrected, often result in learning difficulties." "In this context," the AOA says, "it is not enough to have 20/20 visual acuity. Eye muscles must be co-ordinated well enough to experience single, clear and comfortable vision by maintaining alignment of both eyes. The brain must also match appropriate accommodative or focusing power with where the eyes are aimed. Often, subtle problems with these skills can lead to rapid fatigue of the eyes and loss of 3D viewing, but also loss of place when reading or copying, reduced reading comprehension, poor grades and increased frustration at school. Difficulties with appreciating 3D in movies, TV and Nintendo's 3DS, or discomfort when engaging in these activities, may be an important sign of undetected vision disorders." That doesn't mean 3D is an unalloyed delight for young children. Optical experts and 3D manufacturers warn that children aged six or under shouldn't watch 3D content for long periods. The concern is that developing eye muscles may be susceptible to problems, and while there's no evidence that 3D does any damage to children's eyes - "studies on the effects of prolonged 3D viewing on young children remain to be done," the AOA admits. As Dr Hicks points out, it's very difficult to make even a minor change to eyesight - the precautionary principle says that until more research has been carried out, it's better to be safe than sorry. It's unlikely that 3D will create eye problems in children, but it's possible that it could aggravate some existing conditions. The eyes have it"We don't know enough about the effect of age to make strong recommendations," Professor Banks says. "I'd suggest that you and others pay attention to how their kids are feeling and act accordingly." In particular, parents should watch out for what the AOA calls "the three Ds of 3D" - discomfort, dizziness or lack of depth perception. If a child appears to be having difficulties with a 3D display, it's time to consult an eye expert - the sooner the better. "Although success can be attained in treating conditions such as amblyopia (lazy eye) and strabismus (eye turn) beyond age six, the outcome is always better when children are treated as soon as signs of these problems are detected," the AOA recommends. Variations in eyesight mean that for some people, 3D will never deliver a happy experience, but 3D is just the messenger, highlighting flaws that weren't apparent before. Nobody's brain is being rewired. "Don't worry about brains," Dr Hicks says. "They're resilient, flexible and will always come back to the natural world." And turning up the 3D effect on a 3DS, wearing RealD glasses in the cinema or slumping in front of Sky 3D won't damage your eyes. Like any other technology, 3D is fine in moderation, but overdo it and bits of you will start to complain. 
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| In Depth: Top 10 best social apps for OS X Posted: 20 Aug 2011 05:00 AM PDT Whether you want to manage your Flickr uploads more easily, chat across different instant messaging systems or manage social networks such as Facebook and Twitter in a single app, there's a program to help you do it available for your Mac. We took a look at what's on offer for social types at the Mac App Store and here are our favourite apps. 01. flickery - £5.99
If you're a regular Flickr user, then you'll be aware of how frustrating and time-consuming it can be when managing photos through its online interface. Thanks to flickery, though, you can kiss that frustration goodbye. The flickery app enables you to manage photos from your desktop, and there's even an add-on for iPhoto integration, so you can quickly drag photos between Flickr and your Mac. It's every Flickr user's dream! 02. Trillian - Free
Instant messaging - how we love it so. In fact, there's nothing better than repeatedly having your attention distracted by little windows that appear without warning, pointing you to a video of a cat wearing a beret, or a tap-dancing ferret. If this sounds like your life, then Trillian can bring all your accounts (such as AIM, ICQ, Google Talk and so on) under one roof, and you can send and receive messages across multiple platforms. Yay! 03. Twitter for Mac - Free
Twitter has been through a hectic year of acquisitions, and has rolled much of the intellectual property it has acquired back into its official apps across a number of different platforms. Twitter for Mac - the official client available via the Mac App Store - is a prime example, taking a single column approach, so it can sit on your screen at all times. The client includes multiple accounts, auto-complete, URL shortening, and - naturally - has no API limit. Oh, and it's completely free. If you think that means it's not up to scratch, think again. 04. Courier - £2.99
Like Socialite, Courier helps you deal with time drain by keeping your social streams up to date, but it concentrates on one specific area - uploading. As the name suggests, Courier helps you deliver files to a host of destinations (including YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, Flickr and more). But where Courier really stands out is in its user experience. Each delivery of a file is represented by an envelope, onto which you drag a stamp. You then drag and drop files into your envelope and hit 'Deliver'. Best of all, it's fun! 05. Face Tab - Free
Although some of us spread our lives across multiple social networks, there's no denying that it's Facebook that gets most attention from users across the web. Constant development of its site and mobile apps make it easier than ever to access Facebook, but for some that's still not enough. If you want to stay connected to all your Facebook goodies at all times, then Face Tab is the tool for you. It sits in your menu bar and offers quick access to your profile, updates, messages and more. 06. Socialite - £12
As more and more social services attract our attention, updating and monitoring them can often feel like a full-time job (and for some people, it is). But, thanks to developers like Apparent Software, we now have the tools to make sense of the social noise that can so easily overwhelm us. In Socialite, you have a tool that enables you to add a host of social accounts via one interface. These accounts - Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Google Reader, and RSS links - appear in the left-hand column, with the option to access specific parts of each account (Messages, Retweets and so on), get an overview of all account activity, or - for information junkies - see new items across ALL accounts (to be used with caution). A great app. 07. Echofon - Free
This is the second Twitter client we've featured, but it comes with some nifty features that may be enough to pull you away from the official app. Firstly, Echofon is a client that you can also get on the iPhone, and with so many people accessing Twitter via mobile, the apps can sync between your Mac and iPhone (so there's no going over old ground). Also, you can use keywords to highlight tweets in your stream. 08. Social Lite - Free
Like Face Tab, Social Lite is a tool that sits in your menu bar and enables you to access Facebook without the need to open a browser. Unlike Face Tab, though, you can also access your Google and Twitter accounts. Both tools essentially use iFrames to present the web content; as such, neither will win any design awards, but they are both handy ways to get quick access to your social networks of choice. Plus it's free, so why not give it a try? 09. FlipToast - Free
It's an odd name for a Facebook app, but get past that and what you're left with is a simple dock that enables you to quickly send updates, share images, and view notifications, and all independently of the browser you're using. Limitations include the lack of viewing options, and the fact that the dock stays locked to the top-right of your screen, but it's worth a look for lovers of the Facebook, especially coming at no cost at all. 10. Printful - £5.99
Printful is one of a batch of new apps aimed at presenting web-based articles in a more comfortable manner for extended reading. On the iPad and iPhone it's Instapaper that rules the roost, but if you're looking for a way to manage RSS feeds on your Mac desktop, to read articles without web clutter, and to share stories via your social networks then - despite still being a little buggy - this is the app for you! (Note that you must sign up for an account to use Printful.) 
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| Posted: 20 Aug 2011 03:30 AM PDT The Lenco SB-100 soundbar claims to deliver a 5.1 surround sound experience through the magic of its so-called 3D sound feature, despite not being equipped with digital inputs or any kind of surround sound decoding. The only sockets are one set of stereo phonos and dual 3.5mm line inputs. Analogue signals are processed by circuitry licensed from Sonic Emotion and delivered to your ears via the SB-100's room-filling multiple drive units. There are six full-range tweeters and a 20W subwoofer that offer a combined 80W of power output, which is four times as powerful as most TV screens' built-in speakers. The 3D effect really does create an enveloping sound. When listening to classical music it's as if half the orchestra has gone home when you disengage 3D. With action-packed Blu-ray movies such as 300, dialogue is clear and strong, while individual effects have terrific impact compared with a TV's own speakers. However, the Lenco SB-100's overall sound feels artificial, with a metallic edge to mid-frequency sounds. Also worth mentioning is the 3D mode is not suitable for speech, which sounds lispy. Reserve the room-filling 3D mode for rich, multi-layered soundtracks. The Lenco SB-100 has no hope of physically squeezing into the gap between the bottom of your screen and TV stand, and the company's website shows the bar itself being used as a stand. That's not an option for pedestals with a larger footprint than the soundbar's own (540mm wide x 165mm deep x 110mm high), so placing the bar could be awkward. 
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| Posted: 20 Aug 2011 03:00 AM PDT PSB, named after founders Paul and Sue Barton, isn't a particularly well-known brand in the UK. Yet this Canadian outfit, distributed in Britain by home cinema specialists Armour Home, makes some pretty tasty surround sound speaker packages that are worth consideration. PSB's Imagine 5.1 array scooped the Home Cinema Choice magazine annual award in the Best Speaker System, £2,000-£5,000 category. That £3,000 package blew us away with its build quality and full-range sonic performance, and left us wondering what the brand's high-end models sounded like. Well, we're still wondering, as the next set of PSB speakers we've clapped eyes and ears on, the PSB Image 5.1, is in the more affordable step-down range. Hinting at its shared heritage with the more potent Imagine line, these Image cabinets deliver "affordable high performance", according to PSB. The "performance" element will come later, but PSB certainly has the "affordable" part sorted. Our review setup retails for a very appealing £1,500, putting it in the same price bracket as other cash savers such as Acoustic Energy's Neo V2 and KEF's T-Series. Tastes in speakers vary, but we're happy to say that Images are things of beauty. The black wood finish (also available in dark cherry if that's your thing) aches to be stroked, and there are subtle curves aplenty. Remove the grilles (no magnets here, I'm afraid – but costs have to be cut somewhere) and they look even better, with their yellow driver cones, PSB-branded tweeters and dividing line down the front fascia. If you can trust your family and pets not to damage them, keep the grilles off at all times. The floorstanders of this speaker array are the T5 models. These tower just under one metre high and use a two-and-a-half-way design with identical 5.25-inch bass drivers (but with different crossovers) and a 1-inch tweeter. The enclosure is front-ported and around the back are twin sets of speaker posts, giving you the option of bi-wiring/bi-amping. The tweeter is a titanium affair, with Ferrofluid-cooling and a neodymium magnet – the same sort of high-quality driver found in the Imagine lineup, which bodes well for high-frequency delivery. There are more potent Image floorstanders available, such as the T6, which drop one of the 5.25-inch midrange drivers and bring in a pair of 6.5-inch subwoofers in a three-way design. The same tweeters and bass drivers of the T5 are used on the B5 bookshelf speakers and the sizable C5 centre. Taking care of the low-end is PSB's 150W, 10-inch SubSonic 5i subwoofer. This isn't solely part of the Image lineup and it shows somewhat in its design, which, despite the matching finish, seems a tad more in-yer-face than the other cabinets. But that's how we like our woofers, anyway. After a flick-through of the excellently written and idiot-proof manual, the array was plumbed into our Onkyo TX-NR5008 audio receiver. And good things started to happen.
With both movie material and music, the PSB Image 5.1 speaker system delivers an appealing sound that's easy on the ear. It's warm and rich, without being brash or grating. Much of this comes from the mid-range strengths of the T5 and B5s, which ensures soundtracks come across as full-bodied, rather than simply a mix of highs and lows. Avatar on Blu-ray offers demo-worthy audio, so that's what we started with, and the PSB Image 5.1 sound system is more than a match for the impressive visuals. James Horner's somewhat irritating score swells across the front soundstage, while the Screenwriting 101 dialogue comes across crisp and clean in the middle of the mix. The C5 centre may present a bit of an installation problem in some smaller systems, but its performance merits it. As with the more costly PSB Imagine lineup, it's perhaps the tweeters that grab your attention most here. These techtastic titanium domes spit out high-frequency effects (so important in movie mixes) with speed and relish. When Sully and Grace land on Pandora and explore the wildlife, the buzzing of the forest insects is insistent and tactile. The same applies to when the Na'vi attack their invaders' helicopters with bows and arrows. With the same tweeters lurking in the bookshelf speakers, surround sound effects are delicious, too, and the B5s certainly have enough weight to ensure front-to-back pans don't fizzle out. The enveloping nature of the PSB Image 5.1 system is aided by the subwoofer. It underpins the whole array with a tangible low-end presence and goes surprisingly deep. It could, however, be a little tighter in its delivery. With just the front left and rights in use with stereo music, the lack of real low frequency punch in the T5s becomes more apparent. We'd never not use our subwoofer, though, and suspect even dedicated hi-fi heads will still think the T5s more than adequate, thanks to the richness of the overall sound. The tweeters that excelled so well with the ambient sounds on Cameron's Pandora do the same for the intricate hi-hats on Megadeth's Rust In Peace. Then, with the AVR switched to Full Channel Stereo mode (our preferred weapon of choice with two-channel tunes), all six cabinets come to life to create musical mayhem, and keep their poise even with the volume raised to neighbour-bothering levels. System with a smileFor the money, it's hard to find much fault with PSB's new entry-level speaker array. Yes, the subwoofer could be a touch more agile and the towers don't plumb the depths, but the design, build quality and overall performance easily put a smile on our faces. Anyone ready to step up from a sub/sat system to floorstanders should track a set down and have a demo. 
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| In Depth: How 3D video chat and sound is shaping up Posted: 20 Aug 2011 03:00 AM PDT When talking about the prospect of 3D telephony, it's easy to get distracted by the newest 3D phones like the HTC Evo 3D and the LG Optimus 3D. However, while impressive, these devices don't let you make calls in 3D. What are the odds of 3D video chat happening? When (if ever) will we be able to recreate that famous scene from Star Wars in which R2-D2 plays Princess Leia's holographic voicemail message? Disappointingly, we're a long way from being able to beam 3D video from pico projectors in our phones or laptops, but the technology exists. Scientists at the University of Arizona in Tucson have created a system to capture a 3D image and transmit it (in near real time) anywhere in the world. According to Nature journal's website, the team's system "captures 3D information by filming an object from multiple angles, using 16 cameras that each take an image of the object every second. The 16 views are processed into holographic pixel data by a computer." The resulting three-dimensional holograms are small and slow, but you could have one in your home by 2020. Can't wait that long? Video conferencing specialist TrueConf has developed a 3D version of its popular business software, which can broadcast a 3D video stream thanks to twin cameras mounted on PC monitors. Conference participants need to don Nvidia 3D shutter glasses to get the full effect. TrueConf 3D will be available late 2011 with a price tag of $5,000 (around £3,000). 3D sound
Think that surround sound is 3D sound? Think again. While traditional 5.1 and 7.1 speaker setups can produce a rich soundstage, the audio is mixed to conform to specific channels and speaker placements. The closest you'll get is sitting in the sweet spot of an 11.1 system, which consists of five front speakers (two of them at height), four side speakers, two rear speakers and a subwoofer. It's not ideal for most homes. What we really need is a virtual solution, and Edgar Choueiri, Professor of Physics at Princeton University, is close to giving us one. Disappointed with the realism of traditional surround sound systems, Choueiri developed an audio filter that works with standard stereo speakers. "With 3D audio, I can get a fly to go around your head," he told the BBC's Today programme. "Or if you want to really scare somebody, you can put a sound inside their head." Professor Choueiri's work has the potential to revolutionise home audio, and he has recently formed a partnership with Cambridge Mechatronix (CML) to develop the Dynasonix 3D sound system. According to CML, the technology works by focusing a pair of sound beams on each of several listeners' ears, tracking their positions in realtime with a camera and delivering cross-talk cancelled 3D audio to each listener. As a result, each listener gets their own individual sound field. "This gives you a comparable sound experience to headphones, but without the headphones," says CML. When 3D goes wrong…Autostereograms
What do you do when you want 3D without glasses, but you can't simply project a 3D image? If you're sensible, you wait 20 years for technology to catch up with your plans. If not, you ask people to squint until patterns of dots coalesce into shapes at around 30 frames per second. This is how 3D was simulated in Magic Carpet, a game from 1994, and if you could play it like that, you deserved a prize. That prize: a lifetime supply of paracetamol for the headaches you'd soon be all too familiar with. Most players soon gave up and returned to the regular 2D graphics, and not without cause. Virtual reality
The concept was brilliant - a helmet that puts screens up to your eyes, immersing you in a full 3D world. The downsides? Heavy equipment, nausea from having no actual sensation of movement, and very primitive computers handling the grunt work. The most common VR machines, found in arcades in the early '90s, were powered by an Amiga 3000, and were too limited to be anything but a novelty. Several attempts were made to reignite the concept, but with the intrusive nature of even the slimmest headsets and little to no actual software support, they never caught on. Virtual Boy
The first major 3D games console to hit the market was also the last until this year, when Nintendo launched the 3DS. Being too big and heavy to be portable, too loud to be ignored, and with practically no games support would have been a killer for any system, but the Virtual Boy went one step further by only using a single colour in its graphics, and that colour was red. Rarely has a system been so painful to use for any length of time, or so badly conceived. It lasted a single year on the shelves, but retains its reputation as one of the worst consoles ever created. VRML
The problem with the Virtual Reality Markup Language wasn't simply that it was slow and unimpressive, but that its supporters misjudged what the internet would be. VRML was the language of cyberspace, where we'd walk around a web of 3D mansions and supermarkets, recreating interactions in a virtual context. Instead, the world realised that clicking on hypertext was easier, and cheaper. After attempting to convince everyone otherwise, the software industry saw sense and surrendered. Ecstatica
Most games are built around triangular polygons because they're what 3D accelerator cards were originally built to use. There have been other technologies over the years, including voxels (pixels with depth, originally used to create landscapes in games like Commanche, and which can still be seen in games today) and the hilarity that was ellipsoid-based modelling. This began and largely ended with Ecstatica and its sequel; two horror games full of torture and Satanic plotting (rated 18) rendered hilarious by being, quite literally, a load of balls. 3D controllers
There have been a few brave attempts to create 3D alternatives to the keyboard and mouse. Mostly, these have failed for two reasons: it can be very tiring to have your hands constantly hovering or gripping a controller, and even if the technology is up to scratch (unlike the Power Glove, above, which used ultrasonic sound to detect its position), there's no haptic element to help you sense items in the space. Add in a tendency to be imprecise yet unforgiving, and it's no surprise that the keyboard and mouse are still the tools of choice. 
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| Posted: 20 Aug 2011 02:30 AM PDT LG is currently embroiled in a smart TV war with rival Samsung for dominance of the internet-connected living room landscape. In both TV and Blu-ray, the pair are going head to head with similarly monikered portals (Smart TV and Smart Hub) stuffed with comparable apps and video streaming content, such as in Samsung's recent BD-D7500, which costs around £100 more than the LG BD670 we have for review here. A cursory glance might indicate that there's not much between the two brands. But just how compelling is LG's Intelligence Quotient? Certainly, at first glance the BD670 doesn't look particularly smart. It's quite scruffy in fact; from its dull black plastic body, to the embossed buttonry, it's a bit of a duffer. Rear side connectivity comprises a single HDMI, Ethernet LAN, optical digital audio, phono AV and component port. There's only one USB port, and that's on the front. This is an inconvenience, because the Blu-ray player lacks persistent memory for BD Live applications, so you'll have to live with a thumbdrive sticking out the front if you use BD Live, swapping it over when you want to play media. At least there's no need for a Wi-Fi dongle – that's built-in and works well. You can connect via WPS (if your router supports this) or manually. I took the latter route, and popped the player wirelessly on my network in as much time as it took me to plod around the soft-keyboard.
Thankfully, the LG BD670 smartens up its act considerably when you get to the user interface. The main Home menu consists of a jolly line of colourful function buttons, designated Movie, Photo, Music, Premium and Apps. Click on any one of the first three and the player will show you other DLNA/uPnP clients on your network, allowing you to drill down and stream your media content. For online content options, hit the remaining buttons. Premium takes you to LG's streaming portal (which, bizarrely, appears to reside at the fork in a virtual road, if the background graphic is anything to go by). There's a fair amount of entertainment on tap. In addition to BBC iPlayer and YouTube, there's DailyMotion, Acetrax, Cinetrailers and internet radio service VTuner. Filling out the roster is some easy-to-ignore Google Maps twaddle. Hop over to the apps store and there's more to explore. Curiously, sandwiched between various colour blindness tests and a typo-ridden keep fit tutorial, we found more than a dozen movies, all free to watch. Ultra low-budget indie efforts, they have rather inventively sidestepped traditional movie distribution to end up as download fodder. We don't mind saying that we were rather chuffed with this haul. It's like suddenly discovering a film festival on your doorstep. Free treats like this make smart TV tech such fun to own. The LG BD670 can also stream media across a network and from USB, with a generally good hit rate. MP3s play, along with album art when available, as do AAC files, although both FLAC and WAV are off limits. And, for reasons I can't explain, my standard WMA test rolled out at high speed. Video file support over the network covered AVI, MKV and MOV content.
High-definition image quality is suitably sharp from the LG BD670. The Blu-ray deck scrapes a massive amount of detail from 2D HD platters. Battle: Los Angeles looks sumptuous. Shot in a high frame rate HD, shaky cam-style, skin tones and textures pop from the screen. The smart, connected Blu-ray player also does a reliable job disgorging the DTS-HD MA soundtrack. Stereoscopic footage has the potential to look equally sharp. Of course much depends on what your display will do to the image before it hits your peepers. At least the deck itself does a fine job. Naturally, the LG BD670 is quite at home with home-grown, DIY 3D shot in AVCHD. Disc loading is a tad tardy. The player took a lazy one minute six seconds to go from tray to Bond logo, on the Java-heavy Goldfinger Blu-ray disc. Simpler Blu-rays load rather faster. As a CD spinner, the LG BD670's performance is functional. With no Super Audio CD compatibility to give it a resolution boost, this player's unlikely to convert too many audiophiles to its cause. But its overall presentation is fun: when playing a CD, it pulls album art direct from the Gracenote database. It also features Music ID, designed to identify any tunes in a platter you're playing, at the touch of a button (it sometimes works). As a DVD player, the LG BD670 does a decent job. My venerable Silicon Optix HQV test platter confirms deinterlacing and upscaling to be of a creditable standard. If you have a large collection of SD discs, they'll be in reasonable hands here. Overall, the LG BD670 is a great value internet-connected Blu-ray disc player. Sure, it might have the sartorial style of an impoverished funeral director who dresses in the dark, but it's jazzy where it counts. 
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