Posted on Tuesday 30 November 2004

The SeeLinder, a cylindrical three-dimensional colour television that can be viewed from any angle and doesn't even require the viewer to don funny glasses.


The principle behind it very straightforward. So much so in fact that I could've sworn that I invented it myself sometime in a dream. And if I didn't actually already invent it, I'm almost certain that I would have invented it eventually so this might actually be an example of someone pre-stealing one of my ideas.

But anyway fear not, Dear Reader, I'm not at all bitter. The number of ideas that I haven't had yet exceeds the estimated number of atoms in the universe so I don't mind letting others have run with one or two of them. Jolly good luck to them, I say.


The coolest thing about this device is that it's completely mechanical rather than something much cleverer and harder to understand like holograms. In fact, it draws on century and a half of creaky and cranky prototypes like the proto-cinema of the zoetrope or the proto-television of the Nipkow disk or the 1941 proto-colour television of John Logie Baird, all of which achieved their goals with spinning disks and cylinders as a way to fill in a gap in available technology. This makes me feel that this system will one day be superceded but then I'm reminded that cinema remains to this very day a mechanical system. So what would I know?

To create the illusion of three dimensions a different image needs to be shown to each eye of the viewer. Furthermore, to be really convincing that the television contains a solid object within, a different image needs to be shown for every viewpoint around the cylinder. The SeeLinder does this with two spinning drums, one inside the other. The outer drum has a series of zoetrope style slits in it and spins rapidly while the inner cylinder spins slower in the opposite direction and has a series of columns with LED lights on the it. When the slit and the column of LEDs line up for a given viewing angle a slice of the image becomes visible momentarily. The full image for that viewing angle is built up as the two disks spin and line up at different locations.