The concept of 3D entertainment isn’t exactly ground breaking. Such new-fangled gadgets have been around since the 1830′s. In the mid 1850′s more than 1 million households owned 3 dimensional viewing devices called Stereoscopes. I bet you didn’t know that! And we think we are so clever with our fancy two dimensional 21st century Plasmas and LCD screens. Unfortunately they don’t give us mind blowing depth perception like the high tech 160 year old Stereoscope do they? Well, maybe they can.
Hot on the heels of the amazing 3D other-world cinema experience Avatar, 3D in the home theatre would be something a lot of us would love. Granting us that wish is Samsung who has just released the first 3D Plasma screens in Australia. This is an early introduction into 3D TV consumer technology and there are certain limitations, but it’s a start.
Last night at the AELC Innovation Club, we learnt a lot more about this technology from the people who are developing it. Dr Julien Flack of Digital Dynamic Depth, a Perth company, took us through the history, current status and possible futures of 3D implementation in our daily gadgets such as TVs, phones, gaming consoles and laptops.
What is exciting is that you don’t need a 3D source to start with. Digital Dynamic Depth have spent years developing a technology that will convert a standard 2 dimensional picture into 3D with full depth perception (and yes, amazingly enough, you can even see behind things as the viewpoint changes). What is even more incredible, is that this process happens in real time as you are watching! We saw it ourselves, working on a laptop last night and it is truly impressive full blown 3D.
This means the old stumbling block of there not being enough 3D media out there in the world is no longer an obstacle. You can sit and watch anything you want on your TV from an old 40s favourite flick through your home videos of the kids to the latest episode of Stargate, and the magic created by Dr Flack and his team at Digital Dynamic Depth will convert it for you into 3D instantly as you watch. The dream of Starwars in 3D is upon us.
Samsung are integrating this technology into upcoming TVs for us mere mortals to enjoy. The Dream of Dr Julien Flack is that the technology will be adopted universally and will soon be as common as Dolby is in the audio field. There is a direct correlation with Dolby Pro Logic which takes a standard 2 channel stereo audio source and synthesises it into multi channel surround sound as you listen. Likewise, this on-the-fly 2D to 3D video technology takes a standard 2D video source and synthesises a 3D output for display by the screen.
The only problem left to solve now is how many pairs of 3D glasses does the family really need?!
So what’s “wobulation”? A very high-tech term for little microscopic mirrors that wobble really fast and are capable of producing stereo images. If you have an overhead projector, it’s probably wobbling away right now.
Checking out real-time 2D to 3D conversion on a laptop
