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Post CinemaCon HI/VI Review–Sony CC Glasses

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They did this by putting the letters into a small, see-through portion of both lenses and with a little magic sauce the words are suspended in the void between the viewer and the screen. The distance and font size and lateral position were all adjustable. And they were wonderful. But they needed refining and productization. The pairs that USL showed were made with 3D casting techniques that are not fit for production (fragile and expensive.) But the nice part was that they worked with the other equipment that USL has sold for years to the hearing and sight impaired audience members and the theaters who installed them.

At CinemaCon 2011 there was a wonderful off-the-exhibit-floor display of vendors who supplied equipment to the accessibility community. USL was positioned very close to the entrance of the room, but alongside Sony…who were showing a very refined version of the glasses technology that USL had been developing. What appeared to be happening was an interesting combo for exhibitors; the Sony glasses were receiving their signal from USL’s transmitter. But the glasses were light and nicely shaped and amazingly one could see the letters against the screen even in a bright room.

Expectations were that the system would be available around the end of the year…which came and went without any announcements. There were pictures that were smuggled out and passed around the community, but went unpublished even with the news that other vendors were taking orders around the globe. Some examples are the government grants purchasing equipment for hundreds of theaters in Australia and the recent announcement of complete fitting out of closed caption and descriptive audio or audio enhancement equipment at the complete chain of Marcus Theaters (675 screens in 56 theater locations.) Marcus Theatres(R) Completes Rollout of CaptiView(TM) and Fidelio(TM) Systems. Harkness and AMC have made announcements as well.

But Regal was quiet until they made the announcement at CinemaCon with Sony that they would be installing the new Sony glasses and audio system at all their theaters, with the intention of having closed captioning and assisted listening screenings at every show in every theater. Generally speaking this is not impossible but there are still difficulties on the distribution side. The greatest difficulty lies in the narration track which often isn’t completed until after the main movie is ready for shipping. Who wants to take responsibility for missing a release date because the narration track isn’t done? and how many languages are you going to hold the movie for?

Two years ago this dilemma was on no one’s radar. The promise of digital was gaining momentum everywhere but in the accessibility field. The basic standard was set out in the specifications, but they were made without any equipment being made to test whether the ideas worked in reality. Real world experiments proved that the smooth work flow that gave captions and audio in the analog world of film…with equipment that not only wasn’t available but wouldn’t work if it was…was capable of inconsistent jumbles in the digital world. USL’s engineers worked with engineers of other equipment manufacturers to work out compatibility problems during the times of transition between TI’s Series One and Series Two methods of creating letters and shapes accurately positioned on the screen from data files of text. Hundreds of hours of plugfests with no other manufacturer of HI/VI equipment showing up.

Against this background, USL becomes one of a million companies who help shape a technology and get the arrows of the pioneer as the reward. Sony announced that their clients preferred an all Sony implementation rather than a mixed vendor version. The new glasses system are sold with a receiver that also includes an audio jack so that this rechargeable receiver can also provide audio from the stereo assisted listening or the mono narrative tracks. But, they won’t supply the glasses and the audio headsets (not shown at the demo) at the same time.

Notwithstanding, a nice implementation. And yes, before you ask, 3D lenses can be used in combination with the glasses. The implementation shown at CinemaCon had a Regal logo centered on a flat set of lenses that were made to fit (if somewhat clumsily) into invisible grooves in the glasses frame.

Like Doremi, USL also makes a device that is mounted on a goose-neck that fits into the cupholder. As nice as these units are, and as nice as they have worked to block the light from interfering from adjacent seats…these are Model T implementations compared to the Sony glasses. There is no comparison to the comfort of not having to constantly look down and refocus to read the lines of text. Once an audience member gets used to using these glasses, that’s it. They will only go to a theater that supports them. In the United States, this is a good thing, since Regal has nearly 7,000 screens.

Regal has also put a lot of effort into working with CaptionFish, an online group who can guide the audience to open and closed caption screening times as well as note what type of narration equipment is available. Some narration equipment is able to work with the hearing aids of the user, and some users have purchased their own headsets.

It remains to be seen whether audience members will be able to buy their own glasses and listening device, letting the theater be responsible for the transmitter and link to the movie. One would think that it would be a great opportunity for a sponsor to get involved with partial or complete funding. They are more used to working with this model in the legit theater, which also supplies multiple languages for the scenes in opera or during plays.

All in all this is a wonderful time for accessibility in the US. In England, Your Local Cinema has helped the industry move along for some time there, but there is no great motion anywhere else in the EU…and the growth in accessibility seems stalled even in England. No one is talking of universal accessibility the way that Regal is. Perhaps it was the way that the lawyer who had lawsuits against them put it, when he gave his public presentation to the US Department of Justice. (In it he pointed out how minuscule the cost of accessibility equipment would be compared to the previous year’s corporate dividend.) Who knows? But it is a great thing to have happen after so many promises were broken for so long. In the end it is a mutually beneficial enhancement.

References:

Digital accessibility: Exhibition industry aims to deliver entertainment for all – Film Journal, 18 August 2011

Sony Closed Caption Glasses

 

 

Multiple HI/VI equipments

Articles and News

Post CinemaCon HI/VI Review–Sony CC Glasses

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They did this by putting the letters into a small, see-through portion of both lenses and with a little magic sauce the words are suspended in the void between the viewer and the screen. The distance and font size and lateral position were all adjustable. And they were wonderful. But they needed refining and productization. The pairs that USL showed were made with 3D casting techniques that are not fit for production (fragile and expensive.) But the nice part was that they worked with the other equipment that USL has sold for years to the hearing and sight impaired audience members and the theaters who installed them.

At CinemaCon 2011 there was a wonderful off-the-exhibit-floor display of vendors who supplied equipment to the accessibility community. USL was positioned very close to the entrance of the room, but alongside Sony…who were showing a very refined version of the glasses technology that USL had been developing. What appeared to be happening was an interesting combo for exhibitors; the Sony glasses were receiving their signal from USL’s transmitter. But the glasses were light and nicely shaped and amazingly one could see the letters against the screen even in a bright room.

Expectations were that the system would be available around the end of the year…which came and went without any announcements. There were pictures that were smuggled out and passed around the community, but went unpublished even with the news that other vendors were taking orders around the globe. Some examples are the government grants purchasing equipment for hundreds of theaters in Australia and the recent announcement of complete fitting out of closed caption and descriptive audio or audio enhancement equipment at the complete chain of Marcus Theaters (675 screens in 56 theater locations.) Marcus Theatres(R) Completes Rollout of CaptiView(TM) and Fidelio(TM) Systems. Harkness and AMC have made announcements as well.

But Regal was quiet until they made the announcement at CinemaCon with Sony that they would be installing the new Sony glasses and audio system at all their theaters, with the intention of having closed captioning and assisted listening screenings at every show in every theater. Generally speaking this is not impossible but there are still difficulties on the distribution side. The greatest difficulty lies in the narration track which often isn’t completed until after the main movie is ready for shipping. Who wants to take responsibility for missing a release date because the narration track isn’t done? and how many languages are you going to hold the movie for?

Two years ago this dilemma was on no one’s radar. The promise of digital was gaining momentum everywhere but in the accessibility field. The basic standard was set out in the specifications, but they were made without any equipment being made to test whether the ideas worked in reality. Real world experiments proved that the smooth work flow that gave captions and audio in the analog world of film…with equipment that not only wasn’t available but wouldn’t work if it was…was capable of inconsistent jumbles in the digital world. USL’s engineers worked with engineers of other equipment manufacturers to work out compatibility problems during the times of transition between TI’s Series One and Series Two methods of creating letters and shapes accurately positioned on the screen from data files of text. Hundreds of hours of plugfests with no other manufacturer of HI/VI equipment showing up.

Against this background, USL becomes one of a million companies who help shape a technology and get the arrows of the pioneer as the reward. Sony announced that their clients preferred an all Sony implementation rather than a mixed vendor version. The new glasses system are sold with a receiver that also includes an audio jack so that this rechargeable receiver can also provide audio from the stereo assisted listening or the mono narrative tracks. But, they won’t supply the glasses and the audio headsets (not shown at the demo) at the same time.

Notwithstanding, a nice implementation. And yes, before you ask, 3D lenses can be used in combination with the glasses. The implementation shown at CinemaCon had a Regal logo centered on a flat set of lenses that were made to fit (if somewhat clumsily) into invisible grooves in the glasses frame.

Like Doremi, USL also makes a device that is mounted on a goose-neck that fits into the cupholder. As nice as these units are, and as nice as they have worked to block the light from interfering from adjacent seats…these are Model T implementations compared to the Sony glasses. There is no comparison to the comfort of not having to constantly look down and refocus to read the lines of text. Once an audience member gets used to using these glasses, that’s it. They will only go to a theater that supports them. In the United States, this is a good thing, since Regal has nearly 7,000 screens.

Regal has also put a lot of effort into working with CaptionFish, an online group who can guide the audience to open and closed caption screening times as well as note what type of narration equipment is available. Some narration equipment is able to work with the hearing aids of the user, and some users have purchased their own headsets.

It remains to be seen whether audience members will be able to buy their own glasses and listening device, letting the theater be responsible for the transmitter and link to the movie. One would think that it would be a great opportunity for a sponsor to get involved with partial or complete funding. They are more used to working with this model in the legit theater, which also supplies multiple languages for the scenes in opera or during plays.

All in all this is a wonderful time for accessibility in the US. In England, Your Local Cinema has helped the industry move along for some time there, but there is no great motion anywhere else in the EU…and the growth in accessibility seems stalled even in England. No one is talking of universal accessibility the way that Regal is. Perhaps it was the way that the lawyer who had lawsuits against them put it, when he gave his public presentation to the US Department of Justice. (In it he pointed out how minuscule the cost of accessibility equipment would be compared to the previous year’s corporate dividend.) Who knows? But it is a great thing to have happen after so many promises were broken for so long. In the end it is a mutually beneficial enhancement.

References:

Digital accessibility: Exhibition industry aims to deliver entertainment for all – Film Journal, 18 August 2011

Sony Closed Caption Glasses

 

 

Multiple HI/VI equipments

Exhibitor News

ShowEast [Update]: HFR, 3D Sound, HI/VI Glasses, Test Tools and Duqu

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In a clever move, Christie took the URL highframerate.com – It now points to a story on their site: Expect a higher standard- higher frame rates. They tell the hyped part of the story, and don’t tell any of the grusome details like, how is the technology going to get there? what standards are going to need to change? How many of these standards are going to be backwards compatable? But it is good to see an effort to educate their audience.

What we can glean is that Christie now has their own internal media block and screen management system for their projectors. We’ll post the PR for you to read yourselves. When people start touting “Future Proof Your Long Term Investment”, it might be read as “We haven’t paid attention to this before, but we have nailed it now!”

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Barco has two facilities with their new Auro 3D Sound system now…one in Moscow and a new one in Antwerp at Kinepolis. Barco announced IMB/SMS integration at CineEurope.

That makes a lot of parties interested in selling IMBs. We seem to remember a ShoWest that <3 letter company> secretly showed a network panel and IMB that would do the same over a high speed network several years ago…and everyone said it was too early to talk about. We also remember Laser Light Engine’s Bill Beck describing the vision of fibre running from an engineering room to some DLP chips and a lens at the port hole back in 2004. Looks like the time is going to be here before we know it.

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[Update] USL has just released some new information about their new IMB, which will be used for several of the demonstrations of HFR at ShowEast – The input is 500 Megabits per second, twice the DCI spec datarate of 250 for a DCP. It will push to the projector the data rate of just over 10 Gigabits per second, displaying 60 fps stereoscopic 2K (2048×1080), 12 bit JPEG 2000 color plates. An interested party describes it as absolutely stunning.

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Sony showed the incredible Closed Caption glasses at CinemaCon – then the project went into silent mode. They were working with the USL system (speaking of 3 letter companies), which is the gold standard in the market for several reasons; the first being what was mentioned before – they did a good job of evolving their product line so that a client could upgrade without throwing away their current product.

USL also invested heavily to get people noticing the the closed caption space in general, and the glasses idea in particular. They showed them at plugfests and conventions for a few years, and really invested the time for the industry and client’s benefit.

Closed Caption in glasses is a big deal. Other solutions work, like the small screens that fit into popcorn holders. But they seperate the kids who can’t from the kids who can’t…and we all know how kids are. So a product that allows people with impairments, but who can read, now have a pair of glasses available that don’t look bizarre. The effect of placing the words out in the distance is great, so that they don’t have to keep changing focus. There are many questions to follow-up on, and we are expecting a call with Sony immenently – it sure looked as if USL was going to be able to incorporate the Sony technology into their sales flow, so it could be the best of both worlds.

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Harkness has an announcement that is under embargo until Monday and USL has a rumored announcement. Both show a certain maturity to the industry, and just in time. Several cinematographers have measured light levels in hundreds of cinemas around the world and found deplorable circumstances. One got the impression that, until recently, putting any impediments like quality in the stream would be too much for the industry to bear. In the next update we will have links to articles that are embargoed for pre-release, but the potential for Quality Control takes a couple steps forward at ShowEast.

===>> So now it can be revealed. Hopefully we will get more news as the product matures toward release, which is promised to be early next year.

Like IMBs above, the topic of test tools deserves a full article. Doremi has a new product in test, USL has a new product in test, Harkness has a new product in test, Digital Test Tools has a new product in test. Perhaps the industry is ready for a good examination of luminance on the screen.

The Harkness product is called a Digital Screen Checker, and looks like this.

Harkness Screen Checker
Just what the doctor ordered, though we don’t know much about it. What is the price? What corrolation does it have with a NIST certified device? The viewfinder window leaves some confusion in our simple minds. And is this a plot to impose Foot Lamberts on the other 96% of the world that uses the ISO standard unit of candelas per meter.

On/Off us interesting on something that looks like a USB device. But maybe it is also battery powered? Does the USB aspect imply some database and/or network capability?

The press release is attached at the bottom of this document.

 

USL is also in the process of introducing its LSS-100 Light and Sound Sensor. This product is based upon our 2006 design which combined proprietary luminance and audio level measuring technologies. Their other products in this field are pretty inclusive so, like the Harkness device we look forward to seeing people actually use these devices to make the audience experience more like the director’s intent.USL LSS100

One thing that won’t be talked about at ShowEast is Stuxnet and its new evolution, Duqu. Why would the dcinema industry need to concern itself with a virus that randomly attempts to get into any network to find out information about machine control? We present the link above without comment.

Alternative Content

3D Wonders

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Jeffrey Katzenberg’s desperation plea: Movie biz needs to make movies that look good in 3-D | The Big Picture | Los Angeles Times – Patrick Goldstein
WSJ – Clash of the Titans | Full-bodied takedown
2 articles already commented on Decline and Fall: 3D takes some knocks
Forbes’ Dorothy PomerantzShow Me the Money blog, described Katzenberg’s answer to his critics 

It is easy to agree and disagree with the 3D-bashing. First, this is another case of a technology’s sausage making evolving in public. Usually the steps progress logically. In the case of cinema 3D, Avatar showed what could be done 6 years in advance of what might have happened if natural progression had taken place. This affected all aspects from acquisition and post, and customer perception. Suddenly the bar is set high and movies still in post-production looked 2nd (or 3rd) rate in comparison. Upon these, people are making their judgement.

The part that Cameron didn’t handle was exhibition, though it is said that he tried to arrange for different master prints into auditoriums that could put out more light…which would have been splendid, because there is still a major technical problem of getting enough light to the eyes with 3D, which presents many implications that journalists just skim over (at best). But one point can’t be argued against; there are fewer reasons to forgive the evolution excuse when cinemas are charging extra for the experience, leaving them open to complaints. 

None of the professional critics have room to mention that the cinemas are spending 20 to 30 thousand for the extra 3D portion of the DCinema equipment, plus glasses, plus glasses cleaning equipment, plus the personnel to distribute and clean the glasses. Perhaps that isn’t being explained well by the professional marketeers, but the critic’s research should have figured this out. 

One the other hand, that some cinemas are using silver screens for 3D is just a horror in the making. These screens are made so that some seats get an optimum amount of light. Those outside of this “sweet spot”, which can be the majority of seats, see an inferior picture – a picture with so little light that it causes problems which have not been well researched, and about which people merely generalize.

That the cinemas are then showing 2D movies on these screens should get the SMPTE police on their tails, as well as invoke sanctions if the cinema has a VPF agreement which compels them to follow the DCI specs that call for uniform light across the screen beginning with 48 candela (14 foot Lamberts) in the center. (They are lucky if they get 10 candela now (3.5 ft/L).) As technical articles demonstrate, sitting anywhere off center … or even in the wrong rows depending on the slant of the projector and the screen … makes the already dark 3D image intolerable. People should get a discount instead of being charged more if they are in the wrong areas. See: 23 degrees…half the light. 3D What?

Laser Illuminated Projection Association (LIPA)

The real news of the month has been laser systems. First was an announcement that Laser Light Engines, LLC has received significant financing, including from the IMAX group, for taking their now working products to production. Then Kodak started inviting people to see their system – doubtlessly timed to get people as they went to ShowEast next week. Kodak are not only working to change the source of light, they are changing the entire light block. Their hope is that they can allow standard lenses in the digital cinema projector, knocking off a significant amount of the cost of the dcinema system. And, like with all laser systems, the energy waste a lot less than with the xenon bulbs in standard use.  

And finally, Sony is being shy, but showing that they will have cards to play…which was already obvious 18 and 12 months ago when they went public with their laser announcement(s). (The Science Of The Laser Projector | Sony Insider) There are other rumors of other companies that Sony might be working with – c’est possible. The news though is that they are working publicly to get the standards group that deals with lasers (The US Food and Drug Administration…go figure…) to create a new category named Laser-illuminated Projection. That, instead of the category that laser light shows are under.

Sony, Imax Tout Lasers in Cinema – 3D Cinecast/WSJ
Laser Light Engines gets IMAX funding– Putting Light on the Subject

The article above gives quotes and also points out that increasing light levels will be good for 3D. One can’t have an article about digital cinema without talking about 3D. But it is true, though not the main point.

What that Wall Street Journal article doesn’t mention, and why lasers are mentioned in this 3D article, is not due to the light increase – which will come incrementally and at great pain to the mastering process and exhibition community trying to keep up with even more changes – but rather because lasers won’t need Z-screens or fancy spinning wheels from RealD or MasterImage to make the photons spin in alternating patterns. Giving photons a rotation state is inherent in the capabilities of the laser technology. [Maintaining the rotation state still requires a silver screen, which implies bright spots and dark spots and color shift of the picture depending on where you sit. Perhaps getting more light will allow silver screens with less gain, which might mitigate their most egregious features. But like many things, this requires research – and everyone is busy with the niggling details of keeping up with growth and complying with a change toward international standards after years of transitional standards.]

MasterImage, who also had a press release this month about taking more space at Hollywood’s Raleigh Studios, and RealD are really in a fight for a piece of the home cinema 3D market…as is XpanD. The professional market has been important, and an incredible financial, political and technical operation, but if they win a segment of a growing consumer market, they could afford to lose professional cinema. At this time, the active glasses solution seem to be winning, but the race will be long and the first technology hurdles are just being overcome. Perhaps it will become easier to glue a lens to the front of the screen with enough precision that it won’t subtract from the quality and add too much to the cost, which is what is needed for the passive glasses systems. Then cheap glasses will have a chance. In today’s economy, no one stands a chance…except perhaps for THX, who notably has announced the first THX Certified 3D TV.

YouTube – CEDIA Expo 2010 – What is THX 3D Certification on the LG PX990/PX950 Plasma TVs?
YouTube – LG electronics introduces first 3D TV certified by THX

To MasterImage’s credit, and contrary to the important point in the critics criticisms of 3D in the cinema, MasterImage announced glasses that fit the faces of kids. RealD announced that they were releasing kid sized glasses for Toy Story 3. One wonders how many theaters are making this change? What a scandal that it has taken this long for developers and cinema chains, who up until now have grouped all viewers as if they had the same interpupillary distance, but thankfully that is changing. I still would recommend taking a piece of foam to cushion the bridge of the nose from the plastic, but that’s just me. 

Our picture of a recommendation is in the article:
RealD and Polaroid — Possible Promise PR

Good luck to us all.

Consultants

23 degrees…half the light. 3D What?

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Sillver Screen Light Failure Point3D Luminance Issues—Photopic, barely. Mesopic, often. Scotopic? Who knows…? 

We don’t mean to be picking on the good people at Stewart Film Screens by making an example of their Silver Screen light rolloff curve. They just happen to grace us with the most usable graphic description of what is happening to our light. Looking at Harkness Screens Data Sheet for Spectral 240 3D Screens is not better and may be worse. 

We know the problems of getting light to the eyes for any of the available 3D systems. The initial filter eats up to 50% of the light from the projector, plus the manner of each eye getting turned off 50% of the time, and the darkness of the glasses all steal a lot of light. If the projectors could produce enough light to overcome all these transmission problems…which they generally can’t…it would just mean more burnt expensive bulbs and higher electricity costs. 

But even if the exhibitor cranks it as best as possible, and tweaks the room to get the best RGB balance at the best seats of the house, if the auditorium is using a ‘silver’ screen to maintain the polarity of the RealD or MasterImage system, the patron who is 23 degrees off the center-axis will have half the light available. Put another way, as you can see from the full picture at the Stewart site, 3 seats away from center is a totally different picture…as is the 4th and 5th, etc., as the situation just gets worse. 

If the cinema had achieved 5 foot Lamberts (17 candela/m2) behind the glasses (most don’t get 3ftL – 10c/m2), then 3 seats off center will be 2.5ftL (8.5c/m2). At this point, bright reds have all turned to brick red or darker, and blues are becoming relatively dominant – it isn’t that there are fewer yellows or greens in the picture – it is that the eye becomes better able to discern the blue in the mix. (Another way to describe what is known as the Purkinje shift is that an object that appears greenish-yellow in brighter light will appear to be greenish blue as the intensity of the light descends lower than below 10 candelas/m2.) Combine that with stray light from a few EXIT signs, which not only mess with the contrast but puts non-symetrical data into the normally “practically-” symmetrical 3D mix, plus some reflections in the back of the eyeglasses and the patrons should not wonder why they don’t universally have an enjoyable experience. 

We won’t beat this into a pulp since most real-life scenarios just get worse.

What will make it better?

Consumer education to begin, which is the real excuse for this article. Patrons must know what to insist upon. 

Projectors can’t generate enough light to get 3D up to the 14ftL (48 candelas/m2) that 2D movies are shown at. But the new Series II projectors can do ‘more’ and industry tests show that ‘more’ is better, especially if the original was ‘mastered’ to be shown at ‘more’. James Cameron was prepared to ship theaters a ‘print’ of Avatar that was mastered at hotter levels for cinemas who asked for it…up to 10 ftL! Patrons must insist that if they are paying more for the experience, they should get better…perhaps 10ftL is not going to be the standard this year, but 7 or 8? Grass roots effort anyone? The studios set the intention in the DCI spec at 14, so one would think that they will come to the plate with ‘more’ if asked. [DCI Specification 1.2; page 48…and tell them that you want an order of Uniformity and some of that ±4 Delta E while they’re at it.] 

The future also holds at least two potential ways that will give a better picture. Brian Claypool at Christie points out that one of the features of the Series II projector is “more native support for faster frame rates.” For example, many people in the creative community believe that higher frame rates will do more for image quality than having more pixel resolution. Again, Brian Claypool, “Do you remember how rich every frame was in Avatar, that your eye just kept wanting to look around? Well, imagine having 2 times as many frames for your eyes to follow… it will feel like looking out a window on another reality”.

{youtube}WgrdKmgniGI{/youtube}

The other, also long-term, change is replacing bulbs with lasers in the projectors. Good news on that front was announced by one player, Laser Light Engines. We deconstructed their newest announcement and some of their potential at: Laser Light Engines gets IMAX funding—Putting Light on the Subject. 

Some mark this as digital cinema’s 11th year, but it wasn’t until 6 years ago that 2K was delivered, an example of the evolution of this industry. 

Links: Luminance Conversion Table

Scotopic Issues with 3D, and Silver Screens

Knoting Laser Light

Tangential Art and Science

Home 3DTV Realities

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This article began as a reply to a post on CNET. It has turned into an article that will be added to for more technical content and links.

Minimalist, you’ve exposed many of the problems of 3DTV, but there are many more. There are also a lot of engineers out there solving them, including new standards. Most of the standards though, are dealing with compression and transmission, so expect a format war that will make the hardware choices difficult…and tend to making the choice of waiting the best one.

As is typical in cases like this, there is more than one technology for glasses. It seems that the more expensive shutter type glasses are becoming the favorite choice, even though they are more expensive. The other type, with the circular filters have the more expensive screen (the filter is difficult to apply and align correctly) but the less expensive glasses. In theory, both cause less light to come to the eye, but the filter technology would cause even less than the shutter type. Not a problem if you can kick up the gain smoothly during 3D watching, and back again for 2D material, but generally not a panacea. 

Because of the way that they work, the filter systems also deliver half the picture at a time, interlacing lines. In theory, this will make fast moving scenes stutter. TVs are now already being built with smoothing technology, the so-called ‘Movie’ mode to handle the 24 to 30 frame issues, but to some eyes that sucks resolution. 

There are going to be glasses for a long time. The problems of glasses-free designs may be solved eventually, but they are many. The company with the largest investment pulled out after spending a fortune trying to make it work, Phillips Wow technology. It can work, as long as one keeps ones head stationary, and level. Making it work for more people means less light to everyone’s eyes, which is fine for a while, but still, no one can look at anyone to see how cool they look without glasses, without breaking up the 3D image. …among other problems. Screens with 4K resolution (4 times what we have now) can solve some of this, but not all. The Digital Signage field will still be developing this technology for their purposes, but don’t confuse their advances (or press releases) for Home3DTV advances.

Generally, the main ingredient for 3DTV is a fast TV, and most new TVs are above the refresh rate to handle 3D. Since 50Hz in much of the world, and 60Hz in the States can support good HD, and since half the signal has to be blocked half the time, one needs twice those speeds to make 3D work. Of course, if the technology can match it, even faster is better. Cinema screens get flashed 6 times per 1/24th of a second (3 times for each eye) when showing 3D movies. That explains what Sony is aiming for with 200Hz technology.

That makes other considerations important, like transmission and set-top boxes and what happens when 2D gets mixed with 3D. Sequential, being theoretically 2 full HD fields, needs more data to make a HiDef 3D picture, more than can fit into the HDMI 1.3 pipe. 1.4 is being presented in the market, so that is good, but there is a codec to match that, making everything easier in the future, H.264 MVC. That codec, among other technology, needs to get into the set-top box or into the TV.

Ultimately, home 3DTV is a fast moving field. It is probably not a fad. It is properly called Stereoscopy, since it isn’t a real 3D hologram. But stereoscopy is one of the major clues we get in nature, so when it is done right on a screen, it can be very natural, pleasing and additive to the experience. It is probably not going to be as big switch as the switch to HD, but a lot of people are betting big amounts that it will succeed. 

We’ll continue to add onto this article, with more technical and current data, as well as links. Eventually, it will be an FAQ. Any help will be appreciated.