I recall reading some articles that claimed 3d television was the next big revolution in television.
The articles claimed that this type of 3d would not be the kind that you need glasses for, but would work on a principle similar to those 3d ‘holographic’ refrigerator magnets that appear to have depth when you look at them from different angles. First, how do those stickers / magnets work?
Second, if these tvs are really out there, how do the tvs work? I understand the answer to the tv question will be very very complicated, but any amount of dumbing down you could do would really help.
The cites just basically prove that 3d television exists, I couldn’t really find what I was looking for, which is why I came here.
Also, I know this isn’t GQ territory, but how much of this is pure hype? I am not looking to invest or anything, but is there anyone with knowledge of this who can say if this will be something like going from black and white to color, or just another wacky proposed fringe technology that never takes off like smell o vision or (for years) video phones?
If this really is going to happen, how long before it hits the average consumer and the networks start making programming for it?
I know a fair amount about 3D for movies, but I’ll admit not knowing as much about what’s happening with 3D consumer products. I do know that Samsung has released, and is still releasing, monitors that it calls 3D ready, but I believe they require LCD active glasses.
So a 3D TV would put LCD/LED/plasma pixels behind these lenticular lenses. There are a few TVs based on this technology, but I think for now they’re mostly prototypes, or special applications, not ready for consumer use. After all, they require specially prepared content.
The basic facts are these: in order to perceive 3D, each of the viewers’ eyes must see a different image. The simplest way to do this is to have the viewer wear glasses that somehow prevent the left eye from seeing the right eye image, and vice versa. The most common ways to do this now are anaglyph (red-blue), polarized (old-style linear, or circular), narrow-band color filtration (Infitec, Dolby 3D), and LCD shutter active glasses. The latter uses LCDs to black out each eye alternately, 30 times a second, as the display correspondingly alternates the images. Obviously, the glasses and display must be precisely synchronized, usually by an infra-red signal.
However, many people dislike wearing the glasses. So technologies that don’t require them are being explored. But the basic physics make the problem rather difficult, and the solutions devised so far have inherent problems that I feel make them less satisfactory than glasses. Of course, there will probably be new technologies or refinements of existing ones that make them more effective, so I’m not saying that there will never be an effective glasses-free 3D system.
I’ve seen a couple of lenticular TV displays, and their problems are based in the nature of what they’re doing. Essentially, they are projecting out from the screen two (or more) different images at overlapping angles. If you position your head so that your right eye sees the right image, and the left sees the left, then you get the 3D image. But if you move your head a little, the effect vanishes, or shifts. It’s rather annoying.
Since the lenticular system requires tiny little lenses, the resolution of the image is limited by the size of the lenses. Think about it for a minute: if you can make a lenticular lens that is small enough to fit over a pixel of a regular HD monitor (I don’t know if they can), you have to divide the image into alternating strips of left-eye and right-eye. So you’ve halved the resolution of the display right there. You may be able to make up some of the apparent loss of information by upping the frame rate, but to be most effective in that respect, the original source material would have to be captured at that rate. Which most movies aren’t, at this time.
I’m not up on the technical specs of the systems that are being developed now, but I’m quite sure that the displays I’ve seen were standard def or lower, which leads me to think that HD lenticular displays are going to be difficult and expensive.
In short, IMO, glasses-free 3D TV is not impossible, but it has inherent limitations and difficulties and I suspect that consumer sets won’t be available at competitive prices soon. Sets using glasses of some kind will be available first, and at less cost. It’s just a question of whether there is enough demand for glasses-free sets, and whether the technologies can be improved to the point where the image quality is good enough that people are willing to pay the (inevitably) higher price for it.