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Introduction to 3D technology

It seems that everyone is talking about 3D this year, even though half of them think that 3D is dead before it even started, and the other half know full well that 3D is simply the next step in the evolution of video viewing. digital. In fact, much of the technology touted as amazing new 3D has been around for 20 years or more. Let’s take a look at the 3 main types of 3D displays out there so you know what the local electronics store is trying to sell you the next time you go to upgrade your TV.

First though, what the heck is 3D and why is it so important?

3D is how the average human sees the world around them, although you should know that not being able to perceive in 3D is actually a fairly common disability among many adults. However, assuming you see the world around you in 3D, how can you artificially produce and reproduce something in 3D, like a movie or a video game?

Being able to see in 3D means that your vision has a sense of depth, of how far away objects are from your eyes. Your brain calculates this automatically by combining the images it gets from your left and right eyes, and calculating the small differences that occur when you look at something from a different angle. You can see what I mean by holding a finger in front of your eyes and looking straight ahead. Close one eye, then open it and close the other. Do this quickly and you’ll see how different each one looks. Your finger is in a completely different place for each eye, but your brain puts them back together and realizes that means your finger is close to you.

Making a 3D movie is as simple as using two video cameras, which are set together at roughly the same distance as the human eye. Each one takes a slightly different recording, which when played back in the human brain can show you not only the visual scene but also the depth of everything you see. If the movie was animated on a computer, converting it to 3D is easy, as it just involves re-rendering all the movie data from a slightly different angle. If the movie is shot with 3D in mind from the start, as Avatar was, the effects are amazing.

3D games are actually incredibly easy to make, as all the data needed to figure out where each object is in 3D space is saved directly to the computer and can be processed in real time. In fact, many of us have been playing 3D PC games for 10 years, and the technology is exactly the same as many 3D TVs and movie theaters today.

Assuming you have some 3D data, be it a movie, a computer generated animation, or a video game, the problem is how to display it to the viewer. This is the technological aspect that we are going to discuss a bit today.

However, before I explain some of them, let me say that I won’t talk about those tacky red/blue glasses you get with cheap old DVDs and 3D comics, as that’s not real 3D and the quality is surprisingly poor, besides. because of the fact that everything you see is colored red and blue!

All of these 3D technologies essentially boil down to how to get that slightly different image for each eye separately, without the other eye seeing it as well. Since normal TVs show the same image to both eyes no matter what you do, 3D is impossible on them. That’s why it’s absolutely necessary to buy a new TV if you’re going to watch any kind of 3D material.

But how can we deliver a single image to each eye?

1. Passive Polarized Glasses:

Polarization means making light rays point in only one direction. Normally, the like comes at us pointing in all different directions. A polarizing filter only lets in light from one direction. They are typically used in photography to prevent reflections; for example, if you were to try to take a picture of a window, you couldn’t really see the other side, as the light would bounce back onto your lens. With a polarizing filter, you would remove that and be able to see whatever is on the other side of the window.

The unique and useful properties of a polarizing filter mean that by combining 2 filters, we can make a kind of dimmer switch for light. If you take two pieces of polarizing film (think high school science class now) and rotate them slowly, at one point they will let most of the light through and at another point they will let most of the light through. This is because, in the first instance, the direction of the light is aligned by the first filter that the next filter allows to pass. However, when you rotate the second filter, you are doing so slowly so that the aligned light cannot pass through and reach your eye.

However, in terms of 3D technology, being able to filter particular light beams so that each eye can see them or not means that we can deliver a single image to each eye at the same time. How? We have two images on the television side of things, and each can be biased in a different direction. We then add the same filter to a pair of lightweight glasses, and each eye will only see light that is polarized in a particular direction.

This is basically the cheapest method of doing 3D, and it’s far from perfect. It is used in large 3D theaters where the quality of the movie is not as important as the experience, and probably not a full-length movie, like at Disney World for example. The main benefits are that the glasses are lightweight and incredibly cheap to produce, so it doesn’t really matter if people break or misplace them.

There are several cheaper 3D TVs being produced for the budget market this year, but I suggest you stay away from them. You tend to get a lot of blur between images (so you can see both left and right at once), and you really need to be in a dark room to get the best out of this kind of 3D. Dolby also has a proprietary system that apparently produces better quality than standard filters and is currently used in several better 3D theaters.

2. Active LCD shutter glasses:

This is the best quality 3D you can get right now, and anyone who harped on how good Avatar was probably went to see it using this technology. The active LCD shutter means the viewer has to wear some pretty bulky glasses: each eye has a separate LCD screen inside it, as well as an infrared signal receiver that connects it to the movie being played. Unlike passive polarization which only displays both images on the screen at once, active shutter methods display one frame after another, alternating between the views intended for the left and right eyes. The LCD screens of the glasses turn on and off in sync, blocking one eye and then the other. This turns on and off so quickly that your brain just blends the two images together and forgets about the other 50% where each eye couldn’t see anything.

The advantage of this method is that the quality is excellent, with almost no “bleeding” from one image to another. Unfortunately, some people claim that it gives them a headache. In all my years of playing games with NVidia’s active LCD shutter lenses, I’ve never had a headache, so I suspect the problem is perhaps something you get used to. When television first appeared, I suspect there were similar complaints from a large part of the population.

This will be the 3D platform of choice for consumers for many years to come. Yes, the glasses are annoying, but then again, we won’t see everything in 3D. When I sit down in front of my PC to play a 3D game, for example, I barely notice them. The latest incarnation of NVidia’s LCD shutter glasses is quite light, wireless and recharges from a small USB socket. The bulky models you get in high-end 3D theaters are no longer bulky due to old technology, but simply to make them more resistant to wear and tear and discourage you from taking them home. However, if you’re really against wearing glasses to view 3D content, well, you’ll have to wait a long time. Which brings us to the third method.

3. Parallax screens:

Parallax 3D displays display 3D content without the use of glasses. Although there are many competing technologies and they are rapidly evolving as we speak, the basic principle is that both images are displayed on the screen, then some kind of filter bounces the images in different directions. When viewed from a certain angle, the 3D effect is seen. Most offer a choice of about 6 different angles that you can view from, but outside of those you will lose the 3D effect and just see a blur of two images.

It’s a relatively new technology and it was first shown off last year in the form of the words Fujifilm’s first consumer 3D camera, which I got a chance to play with. The camera took 3D images and was able to simultaneously preview and play back those images on its small, glasses-free 3D screen on the back. This year, the Nintendo 3DS will use a similar but somewhat refined version of the same technology to bring portable 3D gaming to the masses.

My experience with Parallax displays has been less than impressive. First of all, keeping your head in a fixed position is just annoying. Especially if you’re looking at something in 3D, your head has a natural tendency to move and wants to see it from different angles. Also, the depth that you can perceive on one of these screens is quite poor. It doesn’t really “pop” on you at all, even if it looks like it’s 3D. I have yet to see the 3DS though, so I won’t comment on that until it’s available. Either way, this kind of 3D isn’t coming to big 3D TVs anytime soon, or possibly ever.

I hope that gives you a little idea of ​​all this new technology. Don’t forget to check out my other tech tutorials.

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