Have you heard the promise of 3D going main stream all too many times, only to have it evaporate? Well, that could change if some industry mainstays have their way. At the 2009 CES Panasonic revealed plans to push for technical standards that could firmly place practical 3D in home theater setups as soon as a couple years.
The plan includes support for TVs and Blu-ray discs (Panasonic has the Blu-ray clout to make it happen ). Even James Cameron, whose own potential 3D blockbuster is planned for a December 2009 release, is on board lending support.
But Panasonic did not show up at the party with just a plan. Instead they brought some interesting goodies along to prove the theory, including a modified 3D Blu-ray player and (very nice) 8.5 foot plasma screen. The technology incorporates LCD shutter glasses which expose the left and right eye in sync with the on screen images, but unlike slower LCD technology of the past this setup runs 60 to 120 frames per second. In order to make the high speed work, Panasonic boosted the plasma flash rate to 600 times per second.
PopSci reports that the live action clips worked best on the rig, where subtle played more believable than high depth situations, which looked more like cardboard cutouts in front of a painted background. The fact that they can report this effect seems to me to be a great confirmation that the 3D effect must work quite well.
As mentioned earlier, Titanic's Jim Cameron is bringing a state of the art 3D movie, Avatar, to the big screen in 2009, and the producer, Jon Landau, was on hand to tout the advantages of 3D in movie making. He said,
"The visual medium of the great 20th century art form, cinema, hasn’t been improved in the last 50 years. This is now that transformation. And we want to take that transformation not just into the theaters, but we want to bring it into the home, bring it to the consumer and make it available everywhere."
Well, it sounds good. If the promise of mainstream home 3D sticks this time, it will be no coincidence that one of the first commercial 3D Blu-ray titles could just be Avatar. And if the subtle but crafted movie lives up to expectations, that would be fine with us.
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