3D falls flat for Olympics

The past few years have seen some impressive innovations in three-dimensional displays. New digital projectors have made 3D movies come alive in theaters, and high-resolution flat-panel displays can bring 3D television to homes. Digital image processing and 3D helped make Avatar the highest-grossing movie of all time. At the peak of 3D enthusiasm, some in Hollywood predicted that soon 3D production would become standard for movies.

Live sports was supposed to be the next great frontier for 3D, and Panasonic and Olympic Broadcasting Services sent crews to London to record 200 hours of the Summer Olympics in 3D. But the effort seems to have fallen flat. Chris Chinnock reports on Display Daily that the BBC logged an average UK audience of 24 million people for the opening ceremonies, only 111,000 households watched the 3D simulcast, a figure he called "pretty dismal." My own informal poll of a small newsgroup discussing the Olympics found no one who cares about 3D, and one who had never bothered to set up the 3D on his Playstation 3. 

Why did 3D fall flat for the world's biggest sport spectacular? It's tempting to blame the lack of promotion, the difficulty of finding 3D coverage, and the decision to delay all 3D broadcasts by 24 hours. But the truth is that few people outside of the consumer industry show much interest in 3D television. Properly done, 3D can be fun—for a limited time. I enjoyed playing with a 3D set in the video store, but the amusement wore off in 15 minutes. I can see where the 3D versions of some movies might be worth a few extra dollars in the theater. But the monsters in the lap gimmick gets old fast, viewers dislike the active shutter glasses for 3D televisions, and too much intense 3D can cause eyestrain and nausea.





A refreshable holographic image of an F-4 Phantom jet is created on a photorefractive polymer. (Courtesy of the University of Arizona)


New technology from NLT Technologies (Kawasaki, Japan) presents different views to both eyes of several people, allowing them to see depth by the parallax effect without special glasses. However, that's no panacea because the brain senses depth in multiple ways, and conflicts between different cues lead to eyestrain, headache, and nausea. Perhaps we'll have to wait for further development of holographic video.