Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader (51 page)

•
The Result:
Something like this has actually been tried successfully in a few arcade video games, including
Sub-Roc
, a 1983 submarine game by Sega in which you look into a “periscope.” But rather than two TVs, there was a high-speed shutter that quickly alternated the correct image to one eye and then the other. In other words, if the video speed were 30 frames per second, each eye’s shutter would open and close 15 times per second, alternating so that the correct 15 frames would go to each eye. Still, the technology is expensive and clunky and will probably never make it to home television.

•
The Possibility:
This method predates television. In 1915 Edwin S. Porter presented a public demonstration of short depth-enhanced movies of actress Marie Doro, belly dancers, and Niagara Falls using the red-green anaglyph method. He was 40 years ahead of his time. 3-D movies wouldn’t become a commercial success in theaters until the mid-1950s. And then it became the first “successful” method of getting 3-D on television. As long as viewers had a color TV and those red-and-green glasses, it was possible to broadcast the 3-D movies that had been prepared for movie theaters.

•
The Problem:
Viewers had to have a color TV at a time when television was broadcast in black and white, and many people complained that the red-green glasses gave them headaches. And, when seen through the glasses, the 3-D image appeared black and white (or red and green), not in true color.

•
The Result:
The 3-D movies of the 1950s turned out to be a short-lived fad. By the time color TV became common, viewers weren’t much interested in watching black-and-white movies,
whether in 3-D or not. Although later attempts allowed something like color TV, the limited spectrum was unsatisfying.

•
The Possibility:
When Edwin Land invented polarized lenses in 1936, he saw the possibility for using them to view 3-D movies. The lenses let in light vibrating in only one direction and blocked out the rest. He figured out that if he projected two different images on the same screen using polarized lenses at different angles, glasses with the similar alignment could route a separate image to each eye. The system worked, and because it allowed full-color images, it became the most popular method of presenting 3-D in theaters.

•
The Problem:
TV is another matter. There’s no known way to send polarized images through a TV screen.

•
The Result:
Nothing.

•
The Possibility:
For this one, credit German physicist Carl Pulfrich in 1922. He discovered that low light makes your eyes see things a split second slower than bright light. So if you cover one eye with a dark lens and look at a 2-D video, the darkened eye will always be a split second behind its brightly lit partner.

The Pulfrich effect allows a 3-D method that depends on an interesting optical illusion. It can be rendered easily on existing TV technology and in full color. It has produced convincing 3-D images for a Rolling Stones concert special, some commercials, a shark documentary on the Discovery Channel, and special episodes of
Doctor Who
and
3rd Rock from the Sun
. Although broadcasters have sometimes provided decoder glasses, all you really have to do is put a dark sunglasses lens over one eye.

•
The Problem:
The objects on the screen must be constantly moving sideways in the correct direction and at the right speed. If you watch something made for Pulfrich viewing, you’ll quickly notice that the subject or the camera is always moving sideways. (The movement can cause motion sickness in some viewers.)

•
The Result:
It’s had very limited usage. Producers have learned that Pulfrich 3-D is best used in small doses—for example, in one
song in the Rolling Stones concert, or short dream sequences in
3rd Rock From the Sun
.

Still, you can get the effect right now with football games, nature shows, car races, or any program that provides predictable sideways movement across the screen. If it’s moving left across the screen, darkening your left eye will make it see the object slightly to the right of what your right eye sees. This discrepancy tricks your mind into interpreting the object as if were popping out from the 2-D screen. Done right, the effect can be pretty impressive.

•
The Possibility:
ColorCode, a brand name owned by a Danish company, uses the same idea as red-green anaglyph. The difference is in the color of the lenses: ColorCode uses amber and dark blue instead of red and green. This system was first used on TV in a highly publicized 2009 Super Bowl commercial for
Monsters vs. Aliens
in 3-D, and in an episode of
Chuck
. What’s striking is how different the images in each eye are: The amber lens lets in the yellows, reds, and greens, while the blue lens darkens everything into twilight shades of blue. Still, despite the contrasting images, your eyes and brain somehow make it work. The amber allows a wider range of colors than red-green anaglyph, so the effect is full-color. Viewed without glasses, the image looks almost like a normal 2-D video, with just a fuzzy yellow-blue halo around objects on the screen.

•
The Problem:
ColorCode still requires glasses. The difference between what’s seen by each eye is pretty extreme, which could be a recipe for eyestrain or headaches for some people.

•
The Result:
If you have to wear glasses, it’s not bad. In fact, it’s the best, most practical method for 3-D TV so far. And since it’s the method used for recent 3-D cartoons released by major movie studios, its future on DVD is guaranteed.

•
The Possibility:
Convinced that few people actually
like
wearing 3-D glasses, several manufacturers have been working to create a practical 3-D TV system that will stand alone. The methods of directing a different picture to each eye include
lenticular
lenses that angle two different images from the same screen (used in the
3-D illustrations you sometimes see attached to magazine covers and DVD cases) and
parallax barriers
(a fancy name for a slitted material that allows each eye to see only half of the pixels on a screen). Other systems use eye-tracking systems that automatically follow a viewer’s eyes.

•
The Problem:
It’s insanely expensive, and most of the systems require you to sit with your head in exactly the right place, without moving. There’s no reason to believe that Hollywood is going to release content formatted to play on systems for the few people willing to spend $25,000 or more for an eyeglass-free 3-D system.

•
The Result:
These expensive systems are probably suitable only for novelty advertising displays that show films customized for that one specific use. (Ironically, an equally practical, inexpensive, glasses-free 3-D system could be accomplished by projecting two images side-by-side on a wide-screen TV and having viewers cross their eyes until the two images overlap.)

While we’re dreaming, let’s go to the next step. Forget flat-screen 3-D; the holy grail of TV technology is 360-degree holographic images in the round—just like in
Star Wars
—that you can watch from any side. Impossible? Never say never. Many futurists predict holographic TV will be a reality by 2018. With most such predictions, the future is always “just around the corner,” yet it seldom seems to come. But who knows? If we keep predicting that we’ll have holographic TV within 10 years, one of these decades there’s a decent chance we’ll be right.

1.
What you need: a video camera and one lens from a pair of sunglasses.

2.
Sit on the right side of a bus, train, or car and aim your camera at the window.

3.
Watch the video on a TV, holding the lens from the sunglasses over your right eye.

4.
Voilà! Amazing 3-D!

Jaime Negot, mayor of Guayaquil, Ecuador, had received so many “undesirable questions” from reporters at press conferences in 2003 that he appointed a parrot as his official spokes…bird. “Some people only talk nonsense to me,” he said, “So the parrot will answer back in the same way. I need to use my time for work.”