Raw Japan

Two dimensions of 3D

An old Saturday Night Live segment once included this joke when Frank Sinatra was still alive:

“‘Ol’ Blue Eyes’ is back in town, and sources report nobody’s interested and nobody cares.”

That line came back to me after Sony,  once Japan’s “Big Blue”, announced Thursday its vision of an $11-billion 3D market by early 2013, with three-dimensional PlayStation 3s, TVs, Blu-ray Disc players, cameras, live broadcasting and — the historic staple — movies and theatres.

Photo credit: REUTERS/Rick Wilking

I attended Sony’s briefing that included a 2D video of its 3D world, plans for 3,000 projector installations by end-2010, a single-lens High-Frame-Rate movie camera (when previously it took two cameras to make three dimensions), and an end-to-end solution still involving glasses.

The plan was wider than 3D (it pushed back a 5-percent operating profit target to 2013) , but investors sold it Friday, and few analysts saw the technology quickly ending six years of TV losses.

3D TV is on its way

Whenever I hear the words “3D TV”, I’m reminded of a scene in the 1971 flick Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory in which Mike Teavee uses Wonka’s television chocolate machine to miniaturise himself to fit inside a TV screen. As the mini Mike shouts with excitement about his TV debut, his mother reaches into the TV, picks him up and puts him in her purse. As a kid, that was as close as I’d get to 3D TV.

But on Monday, although I wasn’t quite miniaturized, I had the chance to visit a Panasonic plant in Osaka where I put on my own pair of TV glasses and watched 3D TV in a way young Mike Teavee would have loved.

I watched two F1 drivers jostle for position on the track before one roared by the other, appearing as if the F1 car was driving off the screen straight at me. In the next scene, athletes at the 2008 Beijing Olympics flipped, spun, biked, swam and ran as the 3D effect separated them from the background, adding a sense of realism and making for some entertaining TV watching. Floating confetti at the opening ceremonies looked so real I thought I could catch it in my hand.

Panasonic showed off their new 50-inch model 3D TV this week, hoping it will become the size of choice for home theatre enthusiasts when it is released to the public sometime in 2010. The introduction of this smaller sized model — compared to the 103-inch model it debuted last October — brings Panasonic one step closer to delivering 3D TV to living rooms worldwide. It will be debuted for the public at CEATEC Japan from Oct 6-10.

As Panasonic engineer Keisuke Suetsugi explains, active shutters in the glasses work in sync with the TV and Blu-ray player to rapidly alternate full HD images between the viewer’s left and right eyes, tricking the brain into seeing 3D on a 2D screen.