Another try at three

For nearly a decade, television manufacturers have been asking consumers to step into high definition. Now they are asking buyers to step into three dimensions.

At the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, companies such as Panasonic, Samsung and Texas Instruments showed off TV technology capable of displaying 3-D-like pictures.

The industry is billing it as the next big leap in TV technology.

The idea of bringing 3-D to screens in the home is making a comeback after failed attempts in the 1950s and the 1970s.

Hoping the third time will be the charm, manufacturers are making a concerted push to promote 3-D TV as the best way to enjoy live sporting events and action films.

“Unlike earlier attempts, it's not just a gimmick to try to sell a bad horror movie,'' said Doug Darrow, a Texas Instruments executive. “It's a whole different picture now.''

Backers of 3-D say the technology has evolved significantly from the days of red-and-cyan glasses. Already, 1,500 theatres in the United States are capable of showing 3-D images.

In recent years, films such as Bolt and Beowulf were shown in 3-D.

Last month, the National Football League broadcast a 3-D game between the Oakland Raiders and the San Diego Chargers to select theatres and the National Basketball Association will do the same with some events during February's All-Star game weekend.

Nearly two dozen films that can be shown in 3-D are scheduled for release over the next two years.

It is too early to tell whether consumers will bite. So far, audiences have taken well to 3-D releases in theatres.

A joint study by the Consumer Electronics Association and the Entertainment Technology Centre released recently found that nearly 15 per cent of the 1,000 adults surveyed saw a 3-D film at a theatre in the last 12 months.

And 16 per cent said they were interested in watching 3-D films and TV shows at home.

“While the numbers may appear small to some, it is important to remember that 3-D is a technology few consumers associate with a home experience,'' the study said.

One big question: Who will want to don 3-D glasses? The present generation is essentially miniature LCD screens that flicker at high speeds, filtering different images to the left and right eye to produce an image that appears three-dimensional.

“Early pairs looked like welders' goggles,'' said Dan Schinasi, senior manager of product planning at Samsung's consumer electronics division. Now, they are lightweight and look just like sunglasses.

Glasses or not, it will be several years before 3-D TVs become mainstream.

That is because the consumer electronics industry, film studios and broadcasters have yet to agree on standards for recording, transmitting, receiving and interpreting 3-D signals.

Many are hoping those technical details can be ironed out this year, Hunt said. Only then can the work of creating discs, players and TV sets to display 3-D video begin in earnest, he said.

That hasn't stopped companies such as Philips, Samsung, Mitsubishi and Panasonic from introducing “3-D-ready'' sets.

Some 3-D-capable televisions already are in consumer homes. They still need the 3-D programming, conversion software and the glasses to display such images.

“There's in excess of a million TVs in homes today that are capable of showing 3-D and most people don't even know it,'' Darrow said.

That figure would easily double by the end of the year as the format gained momentum, he added.

Images of progress

Stereoscopic imaging has been around since the late 1890s but didn't make a mass appearance until the 1950s, with such horror classics as House of Wax and It Came From Outer Space.

This is what most people now associate with 3-D: rows of theatregoers wearing fold-out paper green-and-red glasses.

The 1960s saw a revival of 3-D with titles that included The Mask and Andy Warhol's Frankenstein. But the drive faded with the lack of blockbuster movies.

The digital 3-D used in theatres and, soon, living rooms, works somewhat differently from its predecessor, which relied on filtering out segments of the colour spectrum for the left and right eyes to create the 3-D illusion.

For one thing, the image quality is much better, thanks to high-definition digital displays. These don't filter out colour.

Instead, they present two distinct, full colour images to each eye. Two versions of digital 3-D use glasses that present different images to each eye.

One is a pair of LCD lenses that alternately opens and closes the left and right lenses in tandem with the screen at speeds as high as 1/60th of a second.

Another version uses polarised lenses that filter and separate left-eye and right-eye images.

There is a third method that doesn't require glasses at all: autostereoscopic displays. They create visual barriers between each pixel so that left-eye images are seen by only the left eye and vice versa.

But these displays have "sweet spots" requiring that viewers be within a narrow range of the TV set to see the effect.