REVIEW

The conference was a very successful event. Probably the most pleasing aspect (from an organiser's point of view) was the large number of demonstrations. People can tell you about a new type of 3D system until they go blue in the face but you just won't get an appreciation for what they are talking about *until* you see the actual device, system or photographs. You've just got to be able to experience the 3D view yourself. There were no less than 12 stereoscopic displays on show in the dedicated demonstration session.

In my opinion, the most notable and novel display of the conference was from Richmond Holographic Studios. They have an autostereoscopic display based on an LCD panel and a holographic optical element (HOE) which casts half the pixels to one eye and the other half of the pixels to the other eye. Like most autostereoscopic displays the head must be in the correct position to see the stereo image but with the addition of eye tracking this could be overcome. Other advantages of the display are that it can quickly and easily be converted to 2D. Depending upon the HOE used, side viewers will only see in 2D or see other 3D viewing zones.

The preface of the conference proceedings includes a list of all the demonstrations. This is available online.

As with most of the past years' conferences, we had stereoscopic slide projection and stereoscopic video projection equipment available during the conference. A good number of presentations used stereo slides and/or stereo video. The breaks were also a good chance to show stereo slides and video which didn't necessarily relate to any of the presentations. Probably the best set of slides was shown by Shojiro Nagata. The slides were from a book "3D Museum" published by Shogakukan Publishing of Japan. They showed a number of famous artworks converted to 3D. The conversions were absolutely fantastic and showed an absolutely flawless attention to detail on the part of the author/artist/programmer (or whatever he should be called).

Of course, there were the conference presentations themselves and there were many shining lights. Have a look at the conference proceedings contents for a list of the papers.

The conference proceedings are available from SPIE. The title is "Stereoscopic Displays and Virtual Reality Systems III" and is proceedings volume number 2653. contact SPIE for further information "http://www.spie.org".

Andrew Woods.