Introduction to 3D technology

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

First, what 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 feeling of depth, of how far the objects are from your eyes. Your brain automatically calculates this for you by combining the images you get from your left and right eyes, and solving the small differences that occur when you look at something from a different angle. You can see what I mean with a finger in front of your eyes and looking forward. Close one eye, then open it and close the other. Do this quickly and you will see how different each one looks. Your finger is in a completely different place from each eye, but your brain recombines the two and discovers that it means that your finger is close to you.

Making a 3D movie is as simple as using two video cameras, which are fixed together at approximately the same distance as the human eye. Each 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, it’s easy to convert it to 3D, as it simply involves re-rendering all of the movie’s data from a slightly different angle. If the movie is shot with 3D in mind from the start, as Avatar was, the effects are impressive.

3D games are really incredibly easy to make as all the data needed to determine where each object is in 3D space is kept directly on the computer and can be processed in real time. In fact, many of us were playing 3D PC games for 10 years, and the technology is exactly like that of many 3D TVs and movie theaters today.

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

However, before explaining some of those, let me just say I won’t be talking about those gooey red / blue glasses that you get with cheap 3D comics and DVDs, since that’s not true in 3D and the quality is surprisingly poor, quite apart! for the fact that everything you see is red and blue!

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

But how can we offer a unique image to each eye?

1. Passive polarized glasses:

Polarization means making the light beams point only in one direction. Normally, as it comes to us pointed in all different directions. A polarizing filter only lets light through from one direction. They are generally used in photography to avoid reflections; for example, if you tried to take a picture of a window, you would not be able to see the other side as the light would bounce off your lens. With a polarizing filter, you would cut it and you could see what was 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 light dimmer. If you take two pieces of polarizing film (think of high school science class now) and rotate them slowly, at one point they will let in as much light and at another point as zero light. This is because, in the first instance, the light direction is aligned by the first filter that the next filter allows you to pass. However, when you rotate the second filter, you are doing it 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 they can be seen or not by each eye means that we can deliver a unique image to each eye at the same time. How? We have two images on the television side, and each can be polarized in a different direction. Then we add the same filter to a pair of lightweight lenses, and each eye will only see light that is polarized in a particular direction.

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

This year a series of cheaper 3D TVs are being produced for the budget market, but I would suggest steer clear of them. It tends to blur a lot between images (so you can see both left and right at the same time), and you really need to be in a dark room to get the best out of this type of 3D. Dolby also has a proprietary system that apparently produces better quality than standard filters, and is currently used in several better 3D cinemas.

2. Glasses with active LCD shutter:

This is the best 3D quality you can get right now, and anyone who has insisted on how good Avatar was was probably going to see him using this technology. The active LCD shutter means that the viewer must wear quite bulky glasses: each eye has a separate LCD screen inside, as well as an infrared signal receiver that connects it to the movie being played. Unlike passive polarization that only displays both images on the screen at the same time, active shutter methods display frame after frame, alternating between views for the left and right eyes. The glasses’ LCD screens turn on and off in sync, blocking one eye and then the other. This turns on and off so fast that your brain simply combines the two images and forgets the other 50% part 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 causes a headache. In all my years of gaming with NVidia active LCD shutter glasses, my head has never hurt, 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 proportion of the population.

This will be the 3D consumer platform of choice for many years to come. Yes, the glasses are annoying, but then again, we won’t see everything in 3D. When I sit in front of my PC to play a 3D game, for example, I hardly notice them. The latest incarnation of NVidia’s LCD shutter glasses is actually quite lightweight, 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 wear-resistant and discouraged from taking them home. However, if you’re really against wearing glasses to watch 3D content, well, it’s going 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 evolve rapidly as we speak, the basic principle is that both images are displayed on the screen, then a type filter bounces the images in different directions. When viewed from a certain angle, you see the 3D effect. Most offer a variety of about 6 different angles from which you can see, but outside of them you will lose the 3D effect and only see a blur of two images.

It’s a relatively new technology, and it was first shown last year in the form of the words Fujifilm’s first consumer 3D camera, which I had a chance to play with. The camera took 3D images and was able to simultaneously preview and play those images on its small 3D display without glasses on the back. This year, the Nintendo 3DS will use a similar but somewhat refined version of the same technology to bring portable 3D games to the masses.

My experience with Parallax displays has been less than impressive. First of all, keeping your head in a fixed position is annoying. Especially if you are watching something in 3D, your head has a natural tendency to move and you want to see it from different angles. Also, the depth you can perceive on one of these screens is quite low. It doesn’t really “stick out” at all, even if it looks a bit like 3D. However, I haven’t seen the 3DS yet, so I won’t comment on that until it comes out. Either way, this kind of 3D won’t hit big 3D TVs anytime soon, or possibly not at all.

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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