3-D: Ready for Super Bowl commercials, but not much else on TV

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It seems like only yesterday that I was in a Hollywood movie theater watching a football game in 3-D. On Sunday, I’ll be at home watching a football game with 3-D commercials. Now that’s progress!

Seriously, although the 3-D trend seems to be accelerating, there remain some notable hurdles. First is the lack of standards for how 3-D images are encoded, delivered, displayed and viewed. The DVD Forum brought a bit of clarity to the market this week when it chose technology by Sensio Technologies, a 3-D firm from Montreal, to be the standard for encoding 3-D images onto a conventional DVD. But even that move leaves several pieces in flux. ...

Sensio CEO Nicholas Routhier explained in an interview that his company’s technology does two things: It compresses the left and right views of a 3-D picture into a single frame that can be delivered through existing 2-D techniques, and it decodes the image at the other end into the appropriate format. Hollywood hasn’t settled on a format, though, which is why different 3-D movies may require different kinds of special glasses -- some with polarized lenses, others with shutterglass, others with different-colored lenses.

At the Consumer Electronics Show this year I donned polarized and shutterglass lenses to view 3-D images on TV screens, but on Sunday I’ll need a type I’ve never used before. The block of 3-D Super Bowl commercials uses technology from ColorCode 3-D, a Danish company that tweaks the color data in each frame to conceal spectroscopic information (i.e., separate images for the left and right eyes) within a 2-D video. That’s a variation on the anaglyph processes of old -- the kind that relied on glasses with one red and one blue lens. ColorCode says it uses an entirely different way of encoding 3-D information, one that requires blue and amber glasses to decode.

The advantage to the colored-glass approach is that it can be used with any TV set. That’s why several of the 3-D DVDs released in the last year, such as Disney’s ‘Best of Both Worlds’ concert film, have relied on colored glasses. The disadvantage, detractors say, is that the images aren’t as compelling as with other processes. If you want the same experience with ‘Bolt’ at home as you had in the theater, you’ll need some special equipment -- some of which is already in many homes, but some of it isn’t.

Here’s how the two other main format types work, and how they match up with equipment.

• Polarized lenses: The left and right image are displayed simultaneously but polarized in different ways. The glasses’ left lens blocks the right image, and vice versa. To view this format at home, you’d need a TV or monitor with polarized glass, which can be a pricey upgrade on a big screen.
• Shutterglass: The left and right images are displayed either in a checkerboard pattern or as interlaced lines. The battery-powered shutterglass lenses block each eye alternately in extremely quick succession. To avoid jitter, each eye needs to be shown at least 60 frames per second, which means the set has to display images at 120 Hz (for plasma; LCD screens typically require 240 Hz to eliminate ghosting, Routhier said). Most digital sets can support those frame rates, particularly rear-projection DLPs. What they can’t do is process the images into the checkerboard or interlaced patterns required for the 3-D effect.

One other technology is being developed -- autostereoscopic displays, which do not require glasses. But autostereoscopic products are a ways off yet. In the meantime, Routhier predicted that shutterglass formats would dominate in the home until the market for 3-D was established, and then more set manufacturers would equip their TVs with polarized lenses. Sensio has more than a dozen shutterglass-based 3-D DVDs on the market today (not counting adult titles) and competitors have some as well, but viewing them requires a special video processor. It recently announced a deal with software developer ArcSoft that would enable people to play 3-D titles with their computers. Still, Routhier said, 3-D viewing in the home won’t take off until the technology is built directly into TV sets, DVD players and Blu-ray machines. Those deals are happening now, he said, adding, ‘The real, serious 3-D TV business is going to start in 2010.’

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times’ Opinion Manufacturing Division.