Need custom-made LCDmodules for experimental display

[ottkosmoses]

Hello
Im an artist from East-European country Estonia.
One of my late projects I'm trying to get working involves lo-fi 3d animations. It is rather similar to analogous LEDmatrix displays (http://www.das-labor.org/wiki/Blinken_Borgs) only instead of using led lights I am planning to use LCD technology. In that way The modules could be side by side and whole recongnizable objects could be built out of 3D-pixels. Beacause of trancparency of LCD-modules the Inner-pixels could be viewable too. (Im not yet sure if one can see thru so many layers on polarized glass)
The idea is to make the specialized animation software with simulator public so that everyone with interest could make their own lo-fi animations and watch what others have done thus far and when the object itself will be ready (if the project can make it over critical thersold) it could be physically exhibited in different places with best animations from community.

Now, If anyone knows are there this kind of LCD.modules out there or a place where one could order a quantity of 3400 to be made.
The size of one unit would be preferably about 2X2cm.

Crystalfontz LCD Blog

Looking for additional LCD resources? Check out our LCD blog for the latest developments in LCD technology.

 

[cosmicvoid]

At the risk of revealing my ignorance, I will offer a speculation on this idea. The transmissivity of a single LCD glass sandwich is not greater than about 50%, assuming a non-polarized light source. So for n layers of LCDs in a plane, the light throughput would be 0.5^n; e.g. 10 layers = 0.5^10, or about 0.1% transmission, 8 layers would be about 0.4%.

 

[ottkosmoses]

Thats what i was afraid of and I'm surprised it took so long for me to realize that. Anyway, could anyone suggest alternative to LCD. The concept itself is so logical, im amazed I cannot figure out in witch way to do it physically.

 

[cosmicvoid]

If it was easy to do, there would be many 3D display devices on the market. I remember reading a magazine article a month ago which showed two of the products available. They were quite complicated and very expensive, in the range of $40K~$100K, IIRC. The target market was medical (viewing body internal organs) or military. One had 20 planes of depth, and was viewable from a limited angle. It used LCD planes that were lit by RGB light from 3 TI DLP chips, and the pixels scattered the light, instead of acting as a shutter (no polarizers); the other was volumetric with some kind of rotating scan mechanism. The article was "Seeing Triple", in Scientific American, June 2007, which can't be read online unless you subscribe.

 

[ottkosmoses]

Thankyou cosmicvoid.
I was really too enthusiastic this time, but nothing can be done with prior scepticism towards project.
So this neat idea is better to be put on the shelf.

Maybe I just settle with simulator this time.

 

[cosmicvoid]

I just realized that my calculations of light transmission are probably wrong. The first LCD panel in a multi-layer stack would have about 50% transmission from a non-polarized source. But after that, the light is polarized, so the remaining layers would have greater throughput. The question is: how much? Let's assume that the transmission of (correctly oriented) polarized light is 85%, and there are 10 layers. The formula would then be: 0.5 * (.85^9) = 11.5% transmission. This may be enough to make a practical experiment. You would have to test your LCDs to see what the transmission of the 2nd, 3rd, etc, layers is actually.