by Paul Rule
How long does it take for a format or technology to migrate from one medium to another? Take wide-screen pictures for instance. In the early 1950s they were in your neighborhood movie house. Only a half-century later, wide-screen TVs were on display at your local electronics emporium. I have a feeling 3D is going to move a lot faster than that.
3D was around in the early 1950s too, but not seriously. Used mostly in low-budget novelty films, audiences considered it a joke and it soon vanished. One of the first was Bwana Devil, a jungle epic with spears thrown directly at the audience for shock value. It was perhaps best known for its ad slogan “A lion in your lap.”
This time the studios are very serious about 3D. They’ve discovered a gold mine. Witness Avatar and Alice in Wonderland. And the TV set makers aren’t sleeping through it. They’re pushing their own 3D systems.
The cinema 3D technology is essentially an improved version of the 1950s spear-tossing films in that the glasses worn by the audience are “passive.” They contain a lens material that filters out the portion if the picture each eye is not supposed to see. The new TV systems tend to use “active” glasses, mechanical devices that open and close shutters rapidly to admit the proper images for each eye.
How long before 3D is an everyday item for the home? I’m guessing less than 10 years. Expect the consumer electronics marketers to position it as necessary for “true HDTV.” That lion is coming to your living room. Don’t let it scratch-up your furniture.
Paul Rule is President of Marquest Media Research.