It’s becoming that time of year again, when holiday shopping begins to consume your mind. In less than a month, Black Friday will be upon us, and you will begin to hunt down deals and try as hard as you can to not spend some exorbitant amount of money on gifts. More often than not, especially if you’re a parent with children, these gifts will revolve around technology and gadgets. Nowadays, new technologies have been revolving around 3D technology, whether it is a 3D television or a new 3D handheld, like Nintendo’s 3DS. This new boom of 3D is transitioning from the movie theaters to your home system, but is it time to make the change? After all, 3D movies have been a gimmick since the 1950’s. Film companies have been using that technique to sell movies for as long time, and there’s no reason to suddenly start investing in this gimmick now, right? Well, with current trends, it seems as though 3D technology might be with us for a long time, and new developments might be making it more feasible and marketable than ever before.
When most people think of 3D movies, they picture glasses with red and blue lenses, which is referred to technically as anaglyph 3D. However, other techniques do exist, and are becoming more popular. All of these techniques rely on stereoscopic principles, meaning that each eye is seeing an image from two separate perspectives. With anaglyph, this is forced by splitting the image into two separate colors, and viewing the image through glasses with two separately colored lenses. The red and blue images are slightly skewed from the base image that is presented, giving you three images. Viewing in this method, the viewer tricks their mind into finding depth in the image by viewing multiple perspectives of the image at the same time, rather than just a single flat angle like a normal camera would take. This technique has been popular since the 1950’s, and is usually used to look at 3D pictures in a magazine, or at the theater. Other forms of stereoscopic 3D include polarized 3D, which does not use multiple colors. Essentially, the screen is specially filtered to allow for the polarized image to go through, with each image being restricted to a specific direction of light. This technique is used on sunglasses to block out a good percentage of the sun’s rays without blocking out all the light or simply tinting the glass. When a movie uses this technique, the movies must be projected from behind the screen instead of from in front of them. Essentially, when light travels in wave form, its wavelengths travel in multiple directions, going up and down, side to side, or diagonally, or anywhere in between. Polarized light restricts the light to just moving in one direction. Two images are placed over one another and polarized to travel in different directions. Then, your new pair of 3D glasses has polarized glass, which will only allow light to travel through going in one direction. Unlike polarized sunglasses, each lens of the 3D glasses takes in light at a different direction, namely the two directions that the film’s picture is being sent in. Therefore, one eye takes one picture and the other eye takes the other, causing your mind to overlay a 2-dimensional image with depth. There are various similar stereoscopic techniques, but they all focus on the same thing: Utilizing your two eyes to send you two separate images, creating the illusion of depth or pop-out imagery.
There are many criticisms of stereoscopic 3D, from the appearance of the glasses to intrusive color. Additionally, most of these displays cause the film to be unwatchable without the 3D glasses. This makes viewers that don’t want to watch the film in 3D or who can’t unable to enjoy the film, since there are obtrusive colors and shadows on the screen. There are, however, some techniques that minimize this effect, making the movie watchable without 3D glasses. These techniques are applied directly to a film, making it watchable on any standard TV in 3D, if you have the glasses, or simply in 2D if you don’t have a pair. However, newer polarization techniques will not work on a standard 2D monitor, and require newer, 3D-enabled televisions with their own sets of polarized glasses. Additional pairs of 3D glasses alone can cost upwards of $100. This price point makes a newer, secondary option far more desirable: autostereoscopic 3D.
Autostereoscopy can be used to send the same illusion of 3D images to the eyes without requiring the use of glasses. One such method is through something called a “parallax barrier.” Used on devices like Nintendo’s 3DS and 3D mobile phones, this is a screen with many thin slits on it. Placing these slits between the LCD screen and the backlight of the device, different amounts of light can be sent through different parts of the screen, much like with the polarized lenses. Essentially, each eye winds up focusing on alternating areas of the image, causing certain parts to appear as having more depth into the screen. This technique is generally good at applying depth, making it appear as though something is sunken into the screen or farther away. Therefore, when viewed at the right angle, a 3D effect is applied to the image on the screen. The primary weakness of this method is therefore that certain angles prevent the 3D effect from being viewed, occasionally causing slight shifts in head orientation to remove the 3D image. Similar techniques to the Parallax barrier include utilizing lenticular lenses, which show different images as being magnified depending on the angle. Thusly, with rows of lenticular lenses on a TV screen, different images on the screen would be magnified differently, causing some to pop out and some to sink in, creating the illusion of a 3-dimensional image. This technology has the same functions and drawbacks as parallax, however, and neither has been shown to be particularly better than the other.
These are the current technological developments in 3D technology. Most of the TV’s that are going to be on sale this holiday season are going to utilize Polarized lenses and glasses to provide a viewing experience, whereas handheld devices will likely be utilizing a parallax barrier. However, this wasn’t the question on your mind. Most people are wondering whether or not buying into the current 3D craze is a good idea or not. For most people, 3D is a fad, simply something to be ignored until it passes. However, anecdotal evidence shows that 3D films have been being released since the 1950’s, and there has been no period without some use of 3D in films. With the most recent developments, it has become apparent that companies are finding brand new ways to show us 3D within a budget. Does that mean it’s necessarily time to buy in? Not exactly. Parallax barriers won’t work well with TV’s, since the 3D on that is generally only best viewed from one viewing angle, whereas a TV is viewed at multiple angles by everyone sitting around it. Still, it is possible that we will have glasses-free 3D TV’s in the near future. Companies continue to work on new means of 3D technology, and each year the innovations will get better. Additionally, we just came off of a long period of time where we were replacing our TV’s with new HDTV’s, and therefore it seems a little hasty to purchase another new format so quickly. When they were first released, HDTV’s cost upwards of $1000, whereas now reasonably sized TV’s can be bought for $200-$300 without much of a hassle. 3D TV’s are high in price now, but are likely to go down in the future, especially once we see the rise of glasses-free 3D. In addition, such technology is currently not advisable for children under the age of 7, as their eyes are still in a developmental phase where forcing them to see in 3D may cause harm. Additionally, 3D can cause headaches and eye strain in some adults as well, meaning that the technology will not be usable by everyone. Over time, however, companies are likely to find solutions to these problems, and introduce new technologies. While it doesn’t look like the 3D craze is being abandoned any time soon, it is certainly not necessarily the right time to buy into such technologies. While new handheld devices like the 3DS or a 3D phone might be appropriate for your family, large-scale 3D TV’s using glasses-based technology will inevitably be replaced by TVs utilizing autostereoscopic methods, and so buying into it now is inadvisable. Wait for a lower price and better technology before you completely give in to the 3D craze.
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