Ubisoft set me off, this time, when they claimed earlier this week that they expect to see 3D televisions in every home by 2013. First off, a year after the apocalypse, 3D television is going to take a severe back seat to survival and zombie slaying. Secondly, since the 3D television is the stupidest, most inelegant backwards-ass item of engineering on the planet, such a claim is, at best, somewhere between DJ Hero and Kid Rock on the retardation scale.
Hopefully, I’m riling up the 3D believers right now, because by the end of this article I’m going to shatter their fragile little world. Like any good waiting-to-pop-the-bubble consumer tech, everyone and their brother is working on their own version of 3D technology, so let’s look at some of these examples of doomed-to-fail lights and circuits.
ANAGLYPH IMAGING
The most common 3D tech (outside the TV space), this is the red-blue/green/cyan glasses that have been around forever. No, literally forever. The technology has existed since 1853, longer than color photography. Got that? Before they were putting color in photos, they were using color to make photos appear in 3D.
Anaglyph imaging works by using different colored cellophane placed over each eye to filter different hued images so each eye only sees one of the overlapping images, and the brain puts the two together to create a 3D image in your mind, much to the delight of filmmakers trying desperately to boost faltering ticket sales in the 1950’s, 1980’s, and 2010’s, and much to the chagrin of the cast of SCTV.
Granted, no one’s really supporting this system as a viable 3D-TV system, but its only a matter of time before some Eastern European no-name manufacturer starts polluting the shelves of Big Lots with a cheap, anaglyph 3D television for eighteen bucks.
WAVE POLARIZATION
There’s a whole lot of math and science involved with exactly how Polarization 3D works, so many explanations of wave polarization end up looking like a 200-Level Physics class, known as the highest level of Physics to everyone but Physics majors. So let me save you $70,000 in tuition and sum it up like this: the image is broadcast in two light waves--one waves up and down and one waves left and right. One lens of the glasses only lets in the ‘up and down’ light, and the other lets in the ‘left and right’ light. Science geeks are upset that I’ve simplified it like that, but really, that’s all you need to know to understand the concept. Imaginary numbers and gamma ratios are unnecessary to everybody else.
When I was in high school, someone from who knows where came and showed us a sample of this technology, and to this day, there are two things that stand out to me from the memory. First of all, this is the only 3D that I’ve ever had much success with, as my eyes have problems processing the colors properly in anaglyph imaging. Secondly, I have no idea why we were presented with a sample of this. I’m guessing the teacher just wanted a day off to grade papers--it’s the only logical explanation for why people made us watch a 3D tech demo as though a bunch of 16-year olds have investment money for their project. Seriously, it wasn’t even a science class; it was during Geography.
Television manufacturers are running with this tech as a cheap, get-it-out-the-door-so-our-stockholders-don’t-think-we’re-dropping-the-ball product, and many of the early adopters who plan on actually using it instead of just placing it in the house for an upcoming shoot of MTV Cribs are going this route.
ALTERNATE-FRAME IMAGING
Lovingly called “shutter glasses” by some, this method is specifically for motion 3D. It essentially takes two complete films, one for the left eye and one for the right, and interlaces the frames one-at-a-time like an indestructible phone book. Glasses sync up to the image and shutter off one eye at a time (“at a time” here meaning 1/48 of a second), making it a highly complicated version of traditional films, firing rapid images to make the mind believe in motion and 3D simultaneously.
TV manufacturers are also backing this pony, though, as I kind of hinted above, this system couldn’t be more complicated short of making you power it via human-sized hamster wheel generator.
AUTOSTEREOSCOPIC DISPLAY
The infamous “glasses-free” 3D display, formed almost entirely because I challenged alternate-frame imaging engineers to create 3D tech that was even more complicated. Autostereoyaddayaddayadda is limited by the angles that the 3D becomes consistent from. Some manufacturers are claiming to have screens that are visible at up to 46 different angles, but even then, figuring that there are 180-squared-degrees that are available between you and a monitor, you’ll need the $70,000 tuition I saved you earlier to study math and engineering to get your living room arranged as such to make sure all your chairs are in viable viewing positions.
Some manufacturers are also experimenting with eye-tracking screens that bend to adjust to your viewing angle and even follow your movements. At first consideration, that sounds like some real high grade Star Trek style benefit-of-mankind technology. At second consideration, you’re dealing with a machine that can reform itself at will, meaning it sounds like some real high grade T-1000 style destruction-of-mankind technology.
WHY THEY ARE ALL POINTLESS
These technologies, for the most part, depend on you having a television screen and a pair of glasses for operation, which means multiple components to purchase for your living room. The autostereoscopic Death-bot is a single component, but is expensive enough you won’t know the difference. All these components fly in the face of the single, most basic principal of engineering: Simpler is better. And simpler 3D is not anything new or exciting:
If the glasses are the necessary component to get the 3D to function, and we have the technology to put screens in glasses, then why in God’s name would we need the television in the first place? We’re already segregating the potential group activity of a single screen by giving the individual viewers glasses, so we’re not losing any more group interaction than they were before. All we’re doing is letting the manufacturers sell us multiple components when we only need one.
So, your 3D-TV is going to vanish faster than Vin Diesel’s career. All it takes is one company bucking whatever treaty the TV manufacturers have to try to fleece us consumers and make their 3D viewing glasses available to the consumer market, and we’ll all be picking a third-world country to make into a landfill for our old discarded 3D televisions. The real, long-lasting design for 3D video is going to look more like this:
Which will still make it hard to see zombies in your peripheral vision, killing us all.