Enough With The Naked Eye 3D LED Stuff, Please!
June 23, 2022 by Dave Haynes
I have had polite arguments with sales people from a few Chinese LED manufacturers, through Linkedin comments, about their assertions that there is something technically special about their display hardware that enables outdoor screens to deliver Naked Eye 3D viewing experiences.
They don’t. It’s all in the creative, and in many cases contingent on viewing that creative from a very specific angle. You will notice the great majority of the images and videos for these jobs are shot off the corner angle of a 90-degree display, and almost never head-on from the front or side (because the illusion isn’t visible).
Some of the marketing by manufacturers, small and large, suggests there are specific products that enable forced perspective and anamorphic illusions – inferring “our LED boards support this” even though pretty much any contemporary LED display with a decent pitch will do it.
I note this because the Chinese manufacturers tend to push back that they’re not suggesting that. So I give you this, from the quite large manufacturer Sansi:
The naked-eye 3D LED display can deliver a very strong sense of spatial three-dimension and it has unparalleled advantages in performance, so it is widely favored in the market. Sansi naked-eye 3D LED display adopts high-performance components and core systems to achieve a high degree of coordination between software and hardware on the large screen, especially for the technical difficulty of “90-degree vertical screens”, which has now also had a good solution. It can be widely applied in high-end commercial settings such as commercial blocks, shopping malls, and office buildings.
Shenyang Zhongjie Naked Eye 3D LED Display
In Shenyang Zhongjie, a pedestrian street with a history of nearly 400 years; YISHION, a well-known clothing brand, created a nearly 500-square-meter arc-shaped naked-eye 3D large LED screen with Shanghai Sansi. YISHION, in the core business district of Zhongjie Road, is stunning with its specially customized Naked-eye 3D LED screen. The debut will turn the old street into a spot of high attention.
Four uses of the phrase in two paragraphs is not a casual reference. That’s a core marketing assertion. Sansi operates in the U.S. as SNA Displays, and those guys – terrific marketers – don’t go there, at all.
UPDATE – Sansi has adjusted the wording to clarify this about clever content, not hardware.
I’ll stress again that Sansi is just one of numerous companies misleading resellers and end-users with the assertion that specific kids of LED displays support this. It’s a hyper-crowded LED display marketplace, so I understand the attraction of trying to get an edge, but aren’t buyers going to be awfully pissed off when they find out the visual magic is all in the creative?
There are, by the way, some LED display products that use things like lenticular lenses to truly do glasses-free 3D, but the ones I’ve seen are politely described as awful.
Hi Dave
Once strict specifications guidelines are met, LED equipment is a commodity. Once that is understood we are talking price and service.
Digital display equipment is not some mysterious secret sauce with 5-6 components its not rocket science! Good rebuttal in your article
Wait, Dave…. are you saying that it is the content that is special and the displays that are commoditized? Heretic that you are, you probably think the sky is blue, too!
You are very right but also, the main purpose of a 3D ad is not to be watched and ejoyed in situ but the virality this amazing creativity offer to the brands, so you don’t need to be in Beijin to enjoy these pieces of art but you can watch them from home and that ad stays in your memory longer than a regular ad. ROI increases considerably.