The Advent of 3D Video Technology

It’s been around for years, in English movies as well as some Hindi ones, but now there is going to be a resurrection of the nerds in silly glasses, and little kids doing ‘ooh!!!’ and little older kids saying “WTF!!!”. I am talking about 3D video technology, more technically known as stereoscopic vision. There is a boom predicted this year for 3D cinema and games, what with about 40 films already in production, and biggies like Sony, LG, Philips, Panasonic and the like all adding that elusive Z axis in their products and marketing. This objective of this article is to throw some light on the technology, and basically just being prepared for it when it hits big, as it is really going to be the future of television.

So what is 3D?
This is for the totally uninitiated: to view in 3D you invariably need special glasses to wear on your eyes. There are some TVs slated to offer 3D without the need for these glasses. But they are still raw in RnD, and they have an inherent problem with viewing angles to actually view 3D. So forget those for now, let's get back to the regular 3D with glasses.

What are these glasses? In their most simplest form (the color filter ones), each lens is a chromatically opposite color, usually red and cyan, and they really do not need to be extremely Hi-fi or immaculate, in fact next page we will do a small DIY on how to make your own glasses.

Theaters that release 3D movies give them to each customer before the show. Even planetariums etc. are all required to give you a small pair when they are showing you a 3D show. Of course there are brands that are already sporting special 3D glasses designs, like Sony who are flaunting Polarized glasses, and another technology which uses LCD shutters on their glasses.

We have the glasses on, so now what? Basically this contraption allows us to view specially created 3D content for a more realistic, three dimensional experience. Imagine the camera fixed and a football coming towards it. In 3D one will actually feel the ball’s trajectory and it will appear nearer to you by the second. In a game if someone shoots a cannon at you, it will actually feel like it whizzes past you, (hopefully you can dodge it). So in a nutshell, it adds the 3rd dimension, or depth. Check this pic with glasses on. It’s made by our very own editor Gagan.

The Gyaan
Before you move on to making your own 3D glasses and accessing 3D content, it’s prudent to understand how the 3D image itself works. IF you look at a 3D image without glasses on, it will plainly look weird, the reason being they are actually 2 images super imposed on each other. Why, because in real life, our eyes see two separate images, one by the left and one by the right, as our eyes are about 2.5 inches apart remember?

For that matter, even our two ears listen to sounds separately, and that is exactly how our eyes and ears can position the source, and gauge how far it is etc. This is the basic concept behind anything stereo. It is this intermixing of two images by the brain (that marvel of an organ) that creates the perception of depth in our vision. Thus in essence, production guys make the 2 sides of the image separate, and with the glasses on, we can see the content in actual 3D.