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Comment by k-mcgrady | Hacker News Reader

It's rumoured to be a phone with a 3D display - but I don't see why I would want that. It's certainly a cool USP but it seems like gimmick that will quickly lose attention. Maybe they've found a use for it I haven't thought of but I don't know anyone who has been requesting a 3D display on their phone.

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> I don't know anyone who has been requesting a 3D display on their phone.

Well, 7 years ago I didn't know anyone who was asking to eliminate physical keyboards from phones.

I'm less skeptical of the merit of the idea (whatever exactly it turns out to be), than I am of Amazon's first generation implementation (based on owning 1st gen versions of Kindle eReader and Kindle Fire).

The thing is 3d screens have been a tested quantity (both on things like the 3DS and on a lot of phones in Japan). It's been far from a hit.

So does the phones without physical keyboards, using touch pens, until Apple figured out how to eliminate that damn pen and just use fingers and here we are today. I give it a benefit of doubt - I doubt that what has been done to 3d displays is all what can be done ;)

The illusion that the display is a window into another parallel 3D world might prove very useful once developers & users know how to exploit it.

Tilting the phone to see 'under' the current foreground might be a way to show next-messages, pending-notifications, etc.

Add a backside display, and perhaps you'd flip the phone for 'details' - and the eye-tracking ensures that usually, only one side is powered at a time.

Or what if each side of a telepresence-connection is being live-mapped with technology like:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ghgbycqb92c

Then, even without a head-worn VR display, your handheld phone/tablet can serve as a roaming-camera into the remote space.

I wouldn't mind it, assuming that this would have no effect on the already bad battery life of those.

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