3D TV?

In my most recent blog post series, I mentioned that during his Sunday NAB keynote, director James Cameron fervently proclaimed 3D digital cinema as the salvation for a movie industry now being fiscally clobbered by piracy. He seemed confident that 3D in the home-based theater was impractical, but based on what I saw the next afternoon I'm not sure I agree with him.

I already told you about the 400" screen-projected ultra-high definition system that NHK Technical Services demonstrated at NAB. Next door, they were also showing a number of prototype 3D-HDTV broadcast television setups, all targeted at viewers wearing passive glasses. There was a projection system, this one employing two carefully-aligned projectors (one on top of the other) versus the conventional digital cinema single-projector spinning polarizer wheel approach. But there were also a number of direct-view televisions, from multiple manufacturers. They employed alternate-scan-line polarization (a less severe implementation of a technique I've already written about) to direct perspective-appropriate images at each eyeball of a glasses-adorned audience member.

I noticed a fair bit of ghosting, and the 3D effect rapidly became muted when I moved to an off-axis viewing position. As it stands now, 3D TV isn't ready for prime time. But remember, these are just early prototypes. The alternating-scan-line polarization approach halves the total horizontal line resolution that each eye receives, but as displays become bigger and pixel-denser, this'll become a decreasingly important issue. I was particularly intrigued by one of the displays, which supported selective enable/disable of the polarization effect and therefore was usable for viewing both 2D and 3D material. And remember, direct-view displays aren't the only means of implementing 3D; we all know how inexpensive high-res DLP, LCD and LCoS projection systems are nowadays, right?

Could 3D be the killer application that makes blue laser optical media relevant for the masses? Could be.