3D TV Technology - Revealing How 3D TV Works......

3D TV Technology - Revealing The Secrets of How 3D TV Works

Over the last year or so the advances in 3D TV technology have been nothing short of amazing, and it seems that from a standing start the major TV manufacturers have got to the stage where they already have 3D ready sets available and in the stores, or have advanced plans for getting 3D TV sets into our homes.

In this article we're going to spell out exactly where we are with the development of 3D TV technology and how 3D TV works. One thing we can be sure of is that the advancements we've seen to date in 3D TV technology may well be only the tip of the iceberg. The race is on to get 3D TV accepted and take its pride of place in the home entertainment arena. That arena is of course your home. understanding how 3D TV works may give you a good guide in future when the time comes to buy your first 3D television.

With the potential for huge growth in the take up of 3D TV over the next few years, and the same immense potential for improvements to the quality of 3D imaging that's likely to be on offer at this early stage, I think it'll be a good idea to date this article. Somehow I'm sure it'll need constant updating to reflect new advances.

April 8th 2010

With new 3D movies like Avatar, Alice in Wonderland, and Clash of the Titans raking it in at the box office, it may seem like 3D is the newest wave in media. Surprisingly, however, the technology to make images appear in three dimensions has been around for over a century.

The first 3D film made its debut in 1922 using the oldest form of technology - anaglyph images - to produce stereoscopy. To understand this we need to consider how our eyes work. Assuming no vision issues, your eyes are spaced a number of centimetres apart, so when looking at any object your eyes send information to your brain from two perpectives. Your brain interprets this information and combines the two images into one 3 dimensional image.

Stereoscopy involves taking a single image, and adding two additional image layers with slightly different perspectives. One layer was tinted red and the other blue. When watching a 3D movie, the audience would then wear cardboard glasses that had one red and one blue lens. Each lens would filter out its similarly colored image layer, thereby tricking the brain into creating a 3D image by mashing the two images together. There was a problem with these colorful anaglyph images, though. They altered the coloring of the movies and interpreting the different images would often cause headaches after a short time. With these issues, it's no wonder the red and blue glasses began fading from use in the 1980s. This led to the creation of polarized 3D glasses.

Polarized 3D glasses operate in a similar way to the red-blue disposables. But rather than using color layers to create an anaglyph image, the layers used two differing polarizations. Each lens would only let the a single layer hit the eye, so the brain could still mash the images together to create a stereoscopic effect, this time in full color! Today, most major cinemas use polarized glasses to produce the 3D perspective in major blockbuster 3D movies.

Now that the 3D revolution has begun, television manufacturers are pushing 3D-at-home and 3D TV technology as the next wave in media content. Unfortunately, the two forms for producing 3D in the theater don't work in the living room. Movie theaters use multiple projectors to produce the extra layers, and that's impossible with a television.

To overcome this the newest glasses innovation is LCD shutter glasses which work on a system known as 'active technology'. These active shutter glasses work by alternately blocking the vision in each eye in conjunction with the refresh rate of the display screen. 3D TVs that use this form will display alternate images with slightly differing perspectives at a high rate, and the glasses darken each lens in time with the alternating images, causing the brain to do the classic image mash-up.

This technology works in a similar fashion as the older glasses, by blocking what image enters which eye. Shutter glasses simply take the idea to the next logical step by literally blacking out the lenses at a high rate of speed. Subsequently, shutter glasses are able to offer a much clearer three-dimensional picture than older methods. Most 3D TVs coming out in 2010 will require the use of LCD shutter glasses, though not all of them.

There a few announced 3D televisions models coming that boast they produce 3D images without need for clunky glasses. This is possible through the use of a parallax barrier on the surface of the display. The parallax barrier works a lot like polarized glasses. A latticework of angled holes across the screen's surface directs different light into each eye, causing images to apparently jump right off the screen. There's an issue, though. With a parallax barrier in place the 3D effect can't be turned off in most cases, and the viewing angle is incredibly limited. Viewers must look straight at the screen to see the 3D.

Using two LCD layers in a single television can conquer this problem. The first layer is the traditional LCD, allowing the use of glasses for 3D content. The second layer contains the parallax barrier, which can be turned off, to create the glasses-free effect whenever it's desired.

Now that the 3D wave is in full swing, this is bound to be only the beginning of viewing innovation. Several companies are working already on bringing 3D images right out of the screen and projecting them into the air. Eventually we may be able to walk through the forests of Avatar's Pandora without leaving the comfort of home. Now, isn't that a mouthwatering thought?