subject: Everything You Wanted to Know about 3D HDTV [print this page] Imagine walking back home after a hard days work and being honoured with a red carpet welcome. Add to this, some colourful butterflies and a shower of flower petals no gibberish. The day is not too far when 3D technology will move out of being only available at the cinema halls but also will be available for everybody at their houses. The story behind 3D TV In the 50s, Disney, Paramount and Universal Studios had all created 3D films for everybody to enjoy and that was considered the birth of 3D technology. This vision was also meant to be the way of the future for watching videos, but soon got killed due tostrain on the eyes and headaches which were caused by watching a 3D movie which usually, was like a fun filled evening for the family.
Since that time, the idea has existed to provide 3D TV to homes everywhere. Of course, this also has to be done without those geeky paper glasses with the red and blue lenses otherwise we will send them back to the drawing board in protest.
Well that was the past, as many companies have developed prototypes that do not need those so called 3D glasses. Moving forward a few technology cycles, and this concept of 3D TV without the glasses has risen from the ashes. The past few years have shown us progress in this field with more and more companies moving towards creating 3D TVs.
A few years ago, Philips introduced their prototype 3D TV which gave people a view of objects actually being next to them. In reality, however, was just being displayed by a 42-inch LCD screen. The 3D technology is actually used with LCD TVs and not a separate new type of TV. They used the concept of sending images, slightly differing from one another, separately to the right and left eye which mimicks our stereoscopic vision. Philips is calling this technology WOWvx and is going to have a range of screens with the same title.
The WOWvx technology places minute lenses over each of the millions of red, green and blue sub pixels that make up a LCD Tvs or plasma display. Basically, there is a processor present in the TV that generates nine slightly different views which correspond to the different viewing angles. This is why, if you view the TV from any angle, you will get a different image in each eye. Providing these many views is the actual key for the success of 3-D TVs.
Currently the best use for 3D TVs lies in playing video games on them. Technically games are created with the generation of three-dimensional objects internally which are then flattened to two-dimensional representation due to the limitations of standard available monitors. Video games are a great ready-made source for 3D content, but what about those of you who dont like to play games, and want other source of entertainment? The reason why currently movies cannot really be shown in 3D is due to the cost.
This cost that we are talking about is not really the cost of creating the 3D TV, as they cost almost the same as the cost to create a regular LCD or plasma TV, but instead it is the cost of creating a movie to be watched in 3D that is affecting it. There is also research going on to convert ordinary 2D videos into 3D, but
it has still not reached an acceptable viewing stage and more work needs to be done for it. For more detail on Technology News India log on to http://www.thinkdigit.com/
