| Video Noise December 2006
3-D, Now and Future
I saw Superman Returns at the local IMAX
Theater last summer, and it got me speculating about what the future of 3-D might be in
home theater. The ad in the newspaper promised "selected scenes in 3-D."
For "selected," read: four. My internal clock is not very reliable at totaling
up how many minutes of 3-D I saw -- maybe ten. For the 3-D scenes, we donned polarized
(not cyan and red) 3-D glasses. The polarizers are aligned vertically for one eye,
horizontally for the other eye. The projected film consists of alternating frames
polarized for the left and right eyes. When a left-eye frame is projected the right eye
sees nothing, and vice versa. This is the current state of the art of 3-D movie
projection, but it’s perhaps not the last word in 3-D quality. The polarized glasses
and frame diminish the brightness somewhat, but the IMAX projectors pulled off the effect
quite convincingly. Still, the holy grail is 3-D without glasses.
I was totally blown away by The Polar Express in 3-D
a couple of years ago. It was the most incredible movie entertainment experience I’ve
ever had. The 3-D in Superman Returns was very good, but only ten minutes out of a
154-minute film meant that the 3-D experience wasn’t nearly as memorable. Three of
the four scenes were all or nearly all computer graphic imaging (CGI), with a few
close-ups of Superman flying. But one scene featured people trying to escape rising water
in a damaged boat -- real people on an effects stage. That was even more compelling than
the creepy-real animation in The Polar Express.
 More recently, I saw Open Season in IMAX 3-D. The
"look" of this CGI-animated feature is more conventionally cartoonlike than The
Polar Express, but way beyond Saturday-morning quality. Despite the movie being a
"B" at best, the 3-D was just too good to miss. Going over a waterfall in 3-D
from a first-person perspective was pretty impressive, even when it was obviously
animation and not live action.
Processing a CGI film for 3-D is quite easy -- you just
have the rendering software produce two slightly different views of each scene, one to
represent the viewpoint of each eye of the viewer. The only real cost is storage space and
computer time. Live action is much harder to get into a format that can be processed into
3-D, as single-camera images have no depth information to work with. This can be overcome
by using synchronized dual cameras, or a special self-contained 3-D camera with two lenses
and two image-capture systems.
People tend to be put off 3-D by the glasses -- especially
those cheap cardboard jobs with red and cyan filters, which create a very limited and
rather ugly color palette. There’s a brief novelty effect, but the ugly color gets
boring within minutes, and watching an entire feature film with cyan-red glasses is
annoying. The polarized system is used at 3-D venues other than IMAX, such as amusement
parks, and motion-simulator rides in Las Vegas and elsewhere. This system is very good,
but watching a 90-minute film with such glasses can produce some feeling of eyestrain.
It’s 3-D without glasses that will cause the demand for 3-D to explode.
3-D home video without glasses has already been conquered
by Sharp, Philips, and several smaller companies. So far, the displays are small and
limited to computer imaging from specific graphics-rendering softwares, and 3-D monitors
are still fairly expensive -- $1500 USD and up for 15" displays. But the first steps
have been taken, and as time goes on the technology will inevitably get less expensive,
and easier to use with a wider range of source material. The technology used in the
current products is certainly adaptable to larger screens, but so far, only a special type
of LCD flat panel has the characteristics needed to display 3-D without glasses.
Don’t think for a minute that HDTV is the end of the
line for home theater. Somewhere out there, somebody is cooking up the first standards for
HD3D without glasses. And if you think 60" is a big enough screen for 2-D
programming, you’ll be demanding a 120" screen for HD3D.
...Doug Blackburn
db@hometheatersound.com |
