New wave of 3D technology comes to TVs

Photo by Ed Sum.

January 22, 2010 - Life

by Ed Sum - Contributing Writer

Electronics consumers could be suffering from upgrade woes soon enough, since practically everyone in the entertainment industry is talking about 3DTV.
3DTVs are televisions capable of displaying objects in three-dimensional space. However, there’s one snag—everyone will have to wear glasses to experience the technology.
The first sets were unveiled at the 2010 Consumer Electronic Show in Vegas and will be available for purchase this summer. Companies like Sony, Samsung, DreamWorks Animation SKG, and Technicolor are pushing very hard to promote it, but it’s ultimately up to the consumer to embrace it.
“They’ll have to decide if they want to go down that path or not,” says Carl Parry, sales representative for Atlas Audio Video. “There have been lots of failed attempts in the past.”
3D technology reached its height of popularity with audiences during the ‘50s, but it was a far from perfect technology back then. Moviegoers wore paper glasses with each lens tinted a different colour.
On screen, there were two disjointed images with the same tint to represent the spatial difference. That gave a three-dimensional effect when combined and interpreted by the viewer’s brain.
Objects leapt out at the viewer, but the cheap technology was far from perfect and some had trouble seeing the 3D properly and complained of eyestrain.
The days of psychedelia are gone and in its place are polarized glasses that do the same thing. The improvement is that there are no badly tinted images. Audiences can now see true-to-life colours.
Theatres are enjoying a resurgence in 3D-movie attendance, with James Cameron’s Avatar leading the way. Cameron was one of the early proponents of 3D cinema and his film shows it off magnificently.
Still, some people think 3D TV will be just another passing fad. Retailers are cautious at best. At the consumer retail level, Parry is taking the-wait-and-see approach, which is being echoed over in corporate sales.
“I’d like to see 3DTV be adopted but, at this stage, I don’t really see it happening,” says Paul Jackson, sales representative for Metro Video Communications.
To embrace any new technology takes time and Jackson believes it’ll take at least five years.
“We are very optimistic about the long-term prospects for 3D at home,” says Candice Haymen, spokesperson for Sony Canada, “particularly as new technology standards are set and as new 3D-enabled devices make their way to the marketplace this year.”
There’s a lot at stake, especially with everyone but the consumer investing millions into this technology.
“The ability to deliver more 3D content will happen because the entire industry is working together to have enough of it by the time the first televisions roll out,” says Haymen.
Jackson, however, believes the television stations won’t have the revenue to buy new equipment every two or three years to keep up with the technology.
“If the film industry adopts it in a big way, it’ll happen really fast. If they’re relying on the broadcasters, I think it’ll go very slowly,” says Jackson.
Most stations have upgraded to provide HDTV because it’s finally affordable. To throw that out now and to buy a 3D television isn’t going to happen for most consumers.
Even then, what about the stations that only broadcast in 2D? Sony’s televisions have a smart chip installed so they can recognize what’s being watched. If it’s regular 2D content, they function just like any other television set. When there’s a signal saying there’s more, they’ll switch to that mode.
Whether or not 3DTV becomes the norm for television viewing in the future remains to be seen. There’s a lot of talk around it, but it could either be a passing fad or become the new norm.
Jackson says that while some content lends itself to 3D, he doesn’t see enough of a difference between watching most programming in 2D or 3D.
Jackson says that with 3D “you’re really limiting yourself to things like Avatar, sports, or nature shows.”

Ed on Jul 24, 2010 at 11:42 PM

It should be noted that the two disjointed images with the same tint should mean, the two images on screen have chromatically-opposing tints. The glasses merge the two images together for the brain to interpret it as a three dimensional image.