Spurred on by the technical and economic success of digitally produced and distributed motion pictures, the inevitable emergence of the third dimension of consumer HD is upon us. Consider the following items...

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Excuse my skepticism, but I've been reading announcements like this in one form or another for fifty years. 3D in the home has always been just around the corner, but it never happens except as a brief and passing novelty. My suspicion is that 3D will never catch on in the home mass market until it's relatively inexpensive and doesn't require wearing glasses. I'd love to be proven wrong on this.

Henry

Personally I don't know why they even bother. I've never enjoyed or been impressed by any 3D film I've ever seen. They always seem gimmicky and unrealistic to me.

That article brought me back some 60 + years ago ....

Recalled the (even then !) antique stereographs & the hand-held viewers with which to "see" those double images on cardboard "slides!"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereoscopy

Later, there were those circular discs - many travelogues & later Disney characters - of some 20 or so half inch square 'films' & plastic indexing viewers by "Viewmaster" which provided many enjoyable "visits" to places in 3 D + color!

Much later, we all went through the versions of IMAX theaters, some of which were even sponsored by our "NASA" as an attempt to create public willingness to withstand it's horrific cost !

Very difficult to comprehend what might "survive" this on-going world crisis ..... for this decade, it might seem that the cost of our existing HDTV is about to become too high for very many !

eli

A few more thoughts about 3D in the home:

Consider a vector that comes out normal to the screen. Let's call that vector Z. The screen itself has coordinates (X,Y). Now in a theater the viewers line of sight vector Z1 is somewhat constrained so the dot product between Z and Z1 is not too different to the magnitude or Z or Z1. However, that is not true in the home. Unless your living room has theater-like dimensions, the dot product can approach zero. This means that traditional 3D would look very weird unless you were sitting pretty close to the Z vector. It's hard to imagine an entire industry catering to people who have home theaters.

A solution to this would be true 3D where you could see a scene from different angles. That would require a holographic projector which, by definition, means a huge leap in bandwidth. But even if that kind of monstrous bandwidth were somehow available and affordable, you'd still be confronted with an entirely new type of television broadcast. Dramatic shows that could be viewed from any angle would be extremely hard to stage and would likely increase the production costs by orders of magnitude.

I'm afraid we're stuck with 2D TV in the home for the foreseeable future. The good news is that 3D in the theater will not have any competition for a very long time.