One of the biggest criticisms of 3D, and one of the main reasons why it is yet to hit the big-time in home entertainment, is the clunky polarised spectacles that frequently make a screening of Toy Story 3 look like a librarian convention.
The Nintendo 3DS is the first commerically available product that attempts to use 3D technology, without condemning gamers to the same dowdy fate, and it’s success is yet to be decided. The technology behind (or should that be in front of) the 3DS’ three-dimensional screen is called a Parallax Barrier and, though it can allow the user to perceive a 3D image, it has massive limitations and would be hard-pressed to stand up to proper scrutiny (for a more in-depth look at Parallax Barriers, see Nintendo 3DS: How It Works). However, recent reports indicate that manufacturers, such as Sharp, Hitachi and Toshiba, are investigating ways of putting Parallax Barriers onto their latest range of 3D televisions.
Cinema’s have, by now, become used to dealing with 3D films; the sudden explosion of 3D films, with the use of more sophisticated technologies than the primitive red-cyan affair, last summer forced cinemas to adapt and, almost a year later, it has become commonplace. However, it was (arguably) easier for cinemas to sell 3D as, by and large, people come to the cinema with the explicit purpose of seeing a film, thus the environment was well-suited and the audience willing to accept the glasses. At home there is no such guarantee, and surveys indicate that people are far more likely to multi-task while watching a film or TV, making the latter almost like background noise. The inception of High-Definition TV has been an unsteady one, as people are, again, less likely to invest in something that they will only half-appreciate; at least here, the only issue is cost which has gradually come down and, combined with major sporting events, allowed a greater uptake. 3D, on the other hands, makes more physical demands. The only way to ensure a great enough uptake to warrant the investment from film studios is to eliminate the glasses, but is using parallax barriers really the right way to go about it?
As we saw in a previous article on MediaKick, there are massive limitations to using this technology, which make the glasses almost seem bearable, the most prominent of which being the fact that a full 3D image is only acheivable if the viewer sits at a very precise angle and manages to remain perfectly still for the duration; making 3D at home a choice between neckstrain or eyestrain. Obviously, this fact has not gone unnoticed by the biggest consumer electronics companies in the world, and are attempting to reduce (if not remove altogether) the problem using what’s being dubbed ‘multi-parallax’. Essentially, multi-parallax (as the name suggests) uses several barriers (in Toshiba’s case, nine) to create nine “golden angles” at which the full 3D image can be perceived, over the Nintendo 3DS’ solitary angle.
No doubt Sharp, Hitachi and Toshiba’s R&D departments will spend the next few months painstakingly experiementing to find out which “golden angles” are needed to ensure the viewer gets all the 3D goodness they can, but either way there is still this damning drawback on parallax barriers. Film buffs, who are always the first to take up a new home cinema technology but always to first to trash it, will marvel at the crisp graphics, but fume when their head slips slightly and the screen looks like the cameraman suddenly developed cataracts.
There are a variety of ways that 3D works, the common feature in all is studios film two different views of the same thing (much how human eyes see objects), then the process that follow depend on the type of glasses that will be used. Some flick the view from each lense on and off continuously so that the eyes keep seeing two different aspects which the eyes will translate into one image and thus 3D. Other ways, including the one I used for my test, include colourising each view if the glasses have certain colours (such as my test glasses, pictured) which used a red/cyan setup. In the latter example, the colour of one aspect is washed out by the lens so that the viewer sees two slightly different views in either eye, again translated into one image by the brain.