First came black-and-white television, then soon after came the transition to colour TV. In the last couple of years HDTV has slowly crept up on the SDTV, but could 3d do to HDTV what colour did to black and white?
It was from watching “Ice Age 3″ in 3d that I realised how far 3d technology has come since the days of those paper red-and-blue (anaglyph) glasses with the strain on the eyes and the strange colours. The newer “polarised” glasses are comfortable, don’t mess with the colours, and don’t cause too much discomfort trying to focus on the 3d image, so overall, the 3d picture was quite impressive. However, the same problem exists in both the anaglyph and polarised glasses: they rely on a warped picture, which the glasses try to separate into two pictures for the two eyes to see. This is what causes the discomfort on the anaglyph glasses, where the lenses don’t separate the picture very well, which means your eyes try to focus on something that isnt there. The polarised glasses do a much better job, but they don’t separate the images completely.
However, a much better solution exists: LCD shutter glasses. These glasses are syncronised with your TV or PC and shut off one eye in time with the frame refreshes. So, for every frame in the video, the tv will display 2 frames. If the first frame is designed to be seen by the right eye, the glasses will shut off the left eye, then the next frame will be shown for the left eye, etc… All of this happens 120 times a second, which unfortunately requires quite a powerful TV or monitor, and one of the latest graphics cards. You can see if yours is supported here. If you have the GPU but not the glasses and monitor, you can get the set off Nvidia here.
So far, the main use of these glasses are for pc gaming, and most games can be run through these glasses in 3d, looking quite spectacular. Unfortunately, the majority of the population aren’t avid gamers, so there has not been much interest in the glasses yet. However, with Europes first 3d TV channel going to air next year, it looks like interest in these glasses are soon to spark off.