3-D movies in your living room may soon be a reality, writes Anthony Fordham, and you won’t have to wear goofy glasses, either.
Some of our readers may be able to remember the experience of going to the movies as children and seeing Disney’s Snow White, or the Wizard of Oz, both films that used an amazing new technology called Technicolor. Now content providers and hardware manufacturers want to give a whole new generation of viewers a similarly paradigm-shifting experience, with 3-D TV.
The real surprise is not that three dimensional, or 3-D TV, is only a few years off, it’s that the technology has taken this long to reach us. Indeed, while much of our current technology is more advanced than say the props in Star Trek — iPod Touch, YouTube, the PlayStation Portable, HDMI — we still can’t enjoy holographic real-time images as seen in every half-baked sci-fi film since about 1950.
First, the good news. Several developers are ready to roll out 3-D TV technology, using commercial installations such as advertising billboards and information displays in shopping centres to jumpstart the 3-D display industry. Then, as always, we’ll see the kit filter down into our own lounge rooms.
