Table Of Content3DTV and 3D Movie Technology
Articles 1996-2018
Michael Starks
3DTV Corporation
Second Edition
Stereoscopic Press
Las Vegas Nevada
Copyright © Michael Starks (2018)
2nd Edition February 2018
ISBN-13: 978-1546396048
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
distributed, or transmitted without the express consent of the author.
Printed and bound in the United States of America.
Cover Photo: Michael Starks and Yan Jin with the 3D WINDOW™ - the world’s first
commercially available large-size autostereoscopic LED display. Made by Chang Lee of
TJ3D Corporation of Tianjin, China 2008
Table of Contents
Preface ...................................................................................................... i
Stereoscopic Imaging Technology ..................................................... 1
3D for the 21st Century: The Tsukuba Expo and Beyond ............ 89
IMAX 3D - Terrific Format, Modest Results (2000) .................... 109
3DX Singapore—Digital 3D Movies for the 21st Century ......... 113
How to Improve Image Quality in 3D Viewing ......................... 135
Will 3D Hurt My Kids Eyes and Why Does It Give Me a
Headache? ........................................................................................... 139
The Future of 3D Digital Projection and Viewing ..................... 142
Stereoscopic Camera Geometry ...................................................... 173
Closeups and Other Tricks in 3D ................................................... 185
3D at NAB 2009---Tools for Shooting, Editing and Displaying
3D Video ............................................................................................. 188
3D at NAB 2010 .................................................................................. 227
3D at Infocomm 2010 ........................................................................ 316
3D and Interactivity at Siggraph 2010 ........................................... 357
Spacespex™ Anaglyph—the only way to bring 3DTV to the
Masses ................................................................................................. 410
2D/3D conversion and viewer comfort ......................................... 424
The 10 deadly sins of DLP Link glasses ....................................... 427
Polarization Issues With 3DTV’s and Projectors ........................ 429
Michael Starks Professional Bio .................................................... 433
Viktor Komar of NIKFI was a Russian pioneer in Stereoscopic cinema and
made the first large size holographic projection screen in the 1970’s. A larger
one was created by Newsight Corp in Jena, Germany ca. 2008.
3D expert Prof. Vasily Ezhov of the Prokhorov General Physical Institute of
the Russian Academy of Sciences. My collaborator for many years, he is a
world class optical physicist and the author of 55 scientific articles and 34
patents. Most of those who think they understand stereoscopy will be
humbled when they read his analysis of stereoscopic display modalities
“Toward the Physical-Information Fundamentals of Three-Dimensional
Displays” in JOURNAL OF DISPLAY TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 12, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 2016
Left to Right. Pioneers in 3D imaging. Yan Jin, Keith Fredericks, Michael
Starks of autostereoscopic display company Newsight Corp and Chang Lee
of TJ3D Imaging Tech. Co Ltd. Tianjin China 2007. Jin and Starks also run
3DTV Corp and Fredericks was a supercomputer programmer at Cray
Research and then CEO of 3DGeneral, which enabled users to transform 3D
formats in realtime on the net (www.3DF33D.tv). Lee founded TJ3D Co and
has been my collaborator and the leading stereoscopic imaging researcher
and 3D hardware developer in China for many years.
My collaborator Kiyoto Kanda, CEO of Newsight Japan, a tireless promoter
of autostereoscopic displays, enabled 3D on 150,000 pachinko and pachi-slot
machines ca. 2014.
Supercomputer programmer and expert stereoscopist John Urbanic of
Neotek, creator or the world’s only photo based stereoscopic educational
system (www.neotek.com), used in high schools and colleges worldwide for
25 years. 3DTV Corp made the glasses and sync devices for it until recently,
when he made a Windows 10 version which works with all modern
stereoscopic display methods. It now can display up to 16Kx16K images
with pan and zoom on any recent PC and has automatic parallax and ghost
reduction. Yan Jin edited the famous Bassett collection of human 3D
anatomy in 4K recently, but only a special dual projector setup, or the very
expensive cinema projectors, can currently display 3D with 4K per eye.
Larry Hornbeck of Texas Instruments, inventor of
the DLP (digital micromirror) technology used for most 3D home and cinema
projection, for which he has received numerous awards. Without DLP it is likely
3D movies and television would have been delayed for decades.
PREFACE
When I was a young boy in 1952 my parents took me to see a 3D movie named
Bwana Devil that started a brief 3D film craze. I had never even seen a
Viewmaster, so I was startled to see lions come charging out of the screen. I never
forgot it and 21 years later (1973) I began researching everything I could find on
3D imaging. I did a complete patent search from the early 19th century on, which
meant hand searching hundreds of bound volumes and many reels of microfilm.
I spent up to 12 hours a day in the stacks of the Berkeley library for about 6
months. I photocopied dozens of rare books and hundreds of articles and patents
on 3D. I saw that the most feasible method was the field sequential one using a
wearable shutter device which had first been done for 3D films some 50 years
earlier. LCD technology was not quite ready at the moment so I settled on
optically transparent high voltage ceramics to begin. Soon fast LCD’s became
available and I sourced them from several companies, but they were too
expensive for a consumer system until 10 years later.
Companies I started included StereoGraphics Corp (now realD, the major
supplier of 3D viewing technology for theatrical cinemas) and 3DTV Corp,
which introduced the world’s first electronic home 3DTV system using LCD
shutter glasses at the CES in Las Vegas in January 1990. At that time, the only
commercially available glasses suitable were those created in Japan for the
Nintendo Famicom 8bit videogame system. Since these had been sold out and
discontinued in Japan, I flew to Hong Kong and spent several days buying up
all the remaining glasses in the toy stores. Subsequently, I had many models
made in the USA and Asia, which I continue to sell as a hobby to this day.
I have been involved in creating and marketing numerous devices for 3D capture
and display and provided 3D technology to countless companies and
universities and a 3D camera system to NASA used for research for the Mars
mission. I provided hardware, consulting and 2D to 3D conversion technology
for the world’s first serious 3D efforts in the late 90’s and early 2000’s to broadcast
3D on a regular basis (Steven’s College in New York with a low power antenna
direct to consumers, a California Company using larger home satellite dishes
then in use, and as technical director of 3DTV Japan broadcasting 3D in Tokyo
over smaller dishes during low viewing times on their Home Shopping
Network). My 2D to 3D conversion patent from 1996, though low tech by current
standards, seems to me to be a blocking patent that all subsequent conversion
must use, and if I still owned it I might be getting royalties from all the 3D films
and much of the home 3D conversion hardware. See
https://www.google.com/patents/USRE39342.
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The 3D image quality of recent films (videos now) is spectacularly better than it
was, as can be noted from the discussions of 3D films. Films in the early 50’s
craze were made with huge mechanically synced 35mm film camera pairs, or in
the case of technicolor, with 6 strips of film. Then each strip had to be optically
printed, edited and projected with dual mechanically connected projector pairs
that were often out of sync and with jitter and weave from the cameras, printers
and projectors. Binocular asymmetries and eyestrain were guaranteed!
These articles on 3DTV and 3D movies were written over the last two decades of
the 44year period since I began. The only ones not here are those that have been
formally published-- on 3D movies in American Cinematographer and half a
dozen in the Proceedings of the SPIE in the 1990’s. They are illustrated with
original photos and historical materials resulting from thousands of hours
researching the technical and patent literature and attending and exhibiting at
trade shows. I decided to publish them in a book as they have only existed in
scattered locations and they have proven quite popular when I recently posted
some of them on the net. They present information and viewpoints difficult or
impossible to find that nicely supplement what is available elsewhere.
The comprehensive coverage of various trade shows held at the peak of the 3D
frenzy (ca 2009-11) are a unique record of what was actually available in the
market place at major international shows. To attend one of them would cost the
average participant about $2000 and a week’s time, with many hours a day
walking the floor, fighting the crowds and exhaustion, and very few would see
or understand most of what was on display. This was easier for me as I had
already spent 36 years studying 3D full time. I exerted the most effort at NAB
(the National Association of Broadcasters) where I trudged the aisles about 8
hours a day for 5 days visiting most of the 3D relevant booths twice, and then
spent several weeks reading and researching to put them into context. The patent
and technical literature searches however occupied four decades. I also include
several practical articles on making and viewing 3D video that include numerous
tips not present in the many books and articles I have seen. I make no attempt to
repeat the material in the many excellent books and countless articles that have
appeared recently. Those who want a fairly comprehensive coverage of 3D
technology should get the SPIE CDs with many hundreds of articles from 1977
to 2009 ISBN-10: 0819476595 and subsequent proceedings, and of course for the
diligent there is no substitute for the patent literature.
As I comment in several places, though thousands (or millions) have contributed
to the technology that gave rise to the rebirth of 3D films and television, if I had
to pick out just two then I think Larry Hornbeck of Texas Instruments, who
invented the DLP micromirror technology used for projection, and Brian
Critchley of projector maker Digital Projection, who took the lead in researching
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and developing it into a workable cinema projector, deserve top honors. Of
course, laser projectors are starting to replace all other kinds for commercial
cinema, and perhaps for home systems if safety issues can be addressed.
Since the 3DTV craze lasted ca. 2009 to 2013 and there are now (2018) few if any
3DTV sets in local stores, some say that it was a failure. However about 40
million 3D sets and maybe 2 million 3D projectors were sold and about a dozen
major 3D films are made each year that are then sold on 3D blu-ray, and maybe
100,000 cinemas are 3D ready, so I think it is a huge success. New 3DTV models
are mostly being made only in the very large sizes such as 98 inches and up
which sell for $50,000 and more. Also, the makers failed to implement a 4K 3D
standard and true 4K 3D blurays are not available so the newer 4K 3D tv’s and
projectors only display 2K/eye, just like the 2K sets. However, the 4K 3D tv’s line
double the 2K 3D input so it still looks noticeably better. At present, only some
of the very expensive cinema projectors display 3D with true 4K/eye. If dual 4K
video is available it can be played back on a pc with dual 4K outputs (dual head
cards or dual cards) on a dual 4K projector setup with polarized glasses or the
Infitec system. 4K 3D dlp home projectors have yet to appear. The image quality
of the existing active glasses 3DTV’s seems poor due to bad ghosting (crosstalk)
with the active glasses models. I recently tested both 32 inch and 75 inch
Samsung 4K 3DTV’s and found noticeable ghosting over the whole screen and
very bad ghosting in the top 1/5th of the screen, due to the failure of the Bluetooth
glasses and/or the LCD to switch fast enough. Three different models of glasses
all had the same issue and there are reports on the net from others, so it is clearly
bad engineering and/or the limits of the LCD technology. I assume the same is
true of all the 3DTV’s from other companies. The passive glasses models from
various makers (notably LG who has many models) will not have this issue, but
since they divide the screen horizontally into alternate lines, the vertical
resolution is halved, which is quite noticeable if you are sitting close.
The new OLED tv’s may avoid most ghosting due to their switching speed being
much faster than that of LCD’s but I have not yet seen a 4K 3D OLED tv. Of
course a 4K passive 3DTV might be the best choice when they become available.
As for all companies, the history of 3DTV Corp can be found in the vast archives
of the wayback machine https://web.archive.org/web/*/3dmagic.com and
https://web.archive.org/web/*/3dtv.jp.
I continue to sell 3D hardware as a hobby and greatly enjoy hunting down
obscure 3D films on the net (many of them never released theatrically in 3D and
only distributed on 3D blu-ray in one part of the world, and so only seen in 3D
by a tiny minority of the viewing public). I am delighted that in a small way my
obsession has helped to bring joy to billions.
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Description:These articles on 3DTV and 3D movies were written over the last two decades of the 43 year period since I began. They are illustrated with original photos and historical materials resulting from thousands of hours researching the technical and patent literature and attending and exhibiting at trade
