3D Another Look at Dolby Glasses Free Display (February 2014) (1 Viewer)

[StephenDH]

In "Dial M for Murder" Hitchcock wanted to give the audience the impression of watching a play and unfortunately he succeeded.
Although there's some entertainment to be had watching Ray Milland and co. dodging behind the pot plants, bottles and floor lamps, it's a very dull movie with some very hammy performances. For some reason Hitchcock wanted Grace Kelly to appear to be on tranquilisers fromabout halfway through and he also succeeded in this, making her even more wooden than usual.

 

[Dwayne]

For what it's worth, the Dolby 3-D TV is essentially a rebranding of the same 3-D technology that Phillips has been demonstrating since 2008. There is little new about it, save for the increased resolution of the underlying TV.

Auto-stereoscopic displays of this size operate differently than a standard 3DTV, in that they use a lens system similar to a lenticular postcard to allow the viewers eyes to see left and right views simultaneously. These TVs do not just present left and right pairs - they require multiple images in between the extremes to essentially fill the area under each lenticule. The inherent problem with this method is the limited viewing angle of the lenses, which leads to the limited "sweet spots" from which the 3-D can be viewed. The wider the viewing angle of the optics, the wider the sweet spot, but at the same time, more images are needed to create the spread from left to right. And lenticular displays DO have limitations on the amount of parallax that they can accurately present before the image degrades and can no longer be seen correctly in 3-D. Very deep 3-D, both in positive (into screen) and negative space (off screen) is impossible with the current tech.

The current wave of auto-stereoscopic TVs have a dirty little secret that isn't well publicized - in order to create the multiple views, the manufacturers are throwing away the original stereo and synthesizing new depth from a single view. In some cases, this means preparing new content ahead of time, as in Dolby's demo, which featured Dolby's in-house conversions of 3-D content within the parameters that work for their TV - and I have spoken with several of the content creators who are disgusted that Dolby has destroyed their stereoscopic intent without noting that the 3-D has been modified from it's original format. In the case of some other glasses-free TVs, they are using an "on the fly" conversion algorithm to take the left eye from a 3-D BluRay and synthesize a new right eye with interpolated in between images. Again while there is depth, the original artists choices are "thrown out" with the right eye view.

Ultimately, glasses-free 3-D television is not ready for consumer use, and is still many years away from practically presenting original 3-D content as the filmmakers intended. There is some great research being done, and I have seen several experimental displays that utilized arrays of projectors (between 75 and 250 HD projectors) to create screen-spanning 3-D with no sweet spots, but these only work with rendered CG content. Computing power may eventually reach a point where 75 discreet views can be encoded/decoded/and synthesized from each frame of a media file, but its not happening in 2014.

Well, that should answer the question regarding whether or not existing formats can coexist with this implementation of auto-stereoscopic. I questioned the technology already, but that just drives the final nail in the deal. What am I to do with all my classic 3D movies? Have this TV reinterpret the offs-screen effects so they appear behind the frame? El stupido. . .

I too have been frustrated by dwindling support for 3D. Another concern is how much longer will they continue to make 3D sets compatible with my existing library of 3D titles?