10th October, 2008
3D For The Home: Reality or Illusion?
Brent Butterworth
Integrators often greet new technologies with trepidation rather than zeal. Most dealers we’ve talked with feel it’s more important for an A/V system to work than for it to include all the latest technology. And all too often, the bugs in new technologies haven’t been worked out before they hit the market.
The latest technology that has integrators curious but cautious is 3-D. There’s a lot of buzz about the resurgence of this decades-old technology. About a year ago, Samsung introduced the first TVs designed to accommodate 3-D gaming; now Mitsubishi is also offering 3-D sets. Da-Lite and JVC put on impressive 3-D demos at September’s CEDIA Expo. Last week, Sony introduced a new 3-D optical adapter that makes it easy and relatively affordable for digital cinemas to show 3-D movies; its demo at Sony Studios’ Culver City, Calif., headquarters blew us away. As a Sony spokesperson told The Integrator this week, having more outlets for 3-D will spur more moviemakers to deliver 3-D content—and the more 3-D content there is, the more consumers will demand it in their homes.
So is 3-D capability something that integrators need to consider when specifying new systems? Let’s look at the prospects….
3-D 101
It helps to start with an understanding of the technologies now in use for 3-D. The 3-D technology currently found in such sets as Samsung’s HL61A750 61-inch DLP rear-projection TV relies on special electronic glasses with LCD shutters. The TV alternates left-eye frames and right-eye frames; for this to work well, the TV needs to have a refresh rate of 120 Hz, so it can show 60 Hz video to each eye. The shutters in the glasses alternate to block left-eye content from reaching the right eye, and right-eye content from reaching the left eye.
From a display standpoint, there’s no great technical hurdle to clear here—there are plenty of DLP and LCD displays now with a 120 Hz refresh rate. However, there’s no video format that currently supports 120 Hz, which is why existing 3-D TVs can perform their tricks only when attached to a computer, and only with video games designed for 3-D. Also, the glasses need to receive a timing signal so the left and right LCD shutters “close” and “open” at the correct times.
It’s possible all of this can be incorporated into the Blu-ray “standard,” and it’s likely we’ll see 3-D capability in at least some of the next generation of video game consoles. But for now, it’s all via computers and it’s all from video games.
OLD-SCHOOL OPTICAL
Theatrical 3-D systems now in use rely on a more organic, analog way of creating 3-D. An optical device that attaches to the front of the projector polarizes the alternate left-eye and right-eye frames in opposite circular patterns—clockwise for the right eye, counterclockwise for the left eye. Glasses with one clockwise-polarized lens and one counterclockwise-polarized lens prevent the right eye from seeing left-eye frames and the left eye from seeing right-eye frames.
The advantage of this method is that it uses polarized glasses that are more comfortable and hugely less expensive than the electronic shutter glasses used for today’s 3-D TVs. The downside is that it requires an optical adapter on the front of the projector that must be moved or deactivated when conventional 2-D content is shown.
How this type of system might translate to home use isn’t clear. Of course, moving anamorphic lenses have become the norm in high-end home theaters, so it’s at least conceivable that an optical 3-D adapter could work in with a home video projector. But it’s hard to believe that the likes of Sony and Panasonic would put their efforts into a scheme with such a small potential audience. What seems more likely is polarization done using electronic, rather than optical, processing.
THE BOTTOM LINE
The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) is putting together a task force to develop 3-D standards for the home. A company called Sensio, which has for a few years now been selling 3-D systems that use specially encoded video, is working to license a 3-D compression/decompression technology to manufacturers. (JVC used Sensio’s technology in its demo of 3-D at CEDIA.) It’s great to see people putting effort into 3-D, but important to realize these are just efforts, which may or may not bear fruit at some indeterminate point in the future.
Now that you’ve got every dimension, in brief, of what’s going on with 3-D, the future from your standpoint should be clear: It’s not something you should worry about right now. From the home theater standpoint, there are no standards. There don’t even seem to be any proposed standards.
For now, the best solution for integrators who want to offer their clients the excitement of 3-D is to get one of the 3-D TVs already on the marketplace, set up a computer gaming system to go with it, and let the kids have at it.
Posted at 6:32 pm |
On October 10, 2008 at 5:19 pm Si Lewis said:
October 10, 2008 at 5:19 pm
I have yet to see a 3-D image that was anything more than a gimmick. It was fun 30 years ago watching the “Creature from the Black Lagoon”, but I have not seen a better technolgy since. This includes everything I saw at the recent CEDIA show.