3D Vision Blog

In the last few days there has been a lot of controversy going on around the fact that Sony has announced that it plans to stop subsidizing the 3D glasses in movie theaters starting next year with the release of the movies “Men in Black III” and “The Amazing Spider-Man.” This has angered the National Association of Theater Owners in US that did not accept these news happily, and this was not the first try for big movie studio to stop subsidizing the glasses. It has happened with 20th Century Fox back in 2009, but they have renounced their plan to stop subsidizing the 3D glasses after the same thing happened as is now happening with Sony. Will Sony do the same as 20th Century Fox is still not clear, but it is clear that unless this happens as an industry wide move the movie theater owners won’t be happy at all. But you know, there are already quite a few placer around the world where movie studios are actually not subsidizing the 3D glasses. This can easily be arranged adjusting the profit distribution shares between the movie theater owners and the movie studios, however movie studios like Sony probably just want to move the cost for the 3D glasses to the theater owners. And this all could lead to a 3D ticket price increase or a decrease in the number of 3D movie projections, but it could also lead to a big market increase in one relatively new category of products – personal movie theater 3D glasses…

Buying and bringing your own personal (BYO) 3D glasses with you when going to a 3D movie projection is already something that quite a few people prefer doing, especially considering some of the side effects of the reusable 3D glasses you usually get in the theater. The reusable 3D glasses in movie theaters are usually being washed in between projections in order to have them cleaned, but how many times you’ve seen the lenses of these glasses scratched or smudged with some cleaning fluid or whatever? You usually have to carefully wipe them out yourself before using them, that is unless you carry your own personal pair of 3D glasses that you can take out and enjoy the movie. There are also some movie theaters that hand out what appears to be packed single-use pairs of glasses that get proper treatment before being repacked and distributed for the next projection… this is usually a better and more problem free solution for the audience, but is probably also more expensive. But you know, getting 3D glasses for a 3D movie projection is something you’d normally expect to get as a service from the movie theater, so should you also not expect to get a discount from the ticket when you BYO 3D glasses? This is one of the options and movie theaters could also start offering different brands of compatible 3D glasses with the type of projection system they are using. And this way they can even further increase their profit by offering different types of personal 3D glasses and in different price ranges, so that you will know when you spent some money for a personal pair of glasses you would then get a discount from the 3D movie tickets.

Having movie theaters offering different personal 3D glasses is probably the best way, especially considering the fact that there are multiple 3D projection systems in use that require the viewer to wear a different type of 3D glasses to see the proper image. These are mostly passive solutions – IMAX, RealD and Dolby 3D as well as some active ones such as XpanD, which is probably the most widely used active solution for 3D movie theaters. Obviously active and passive 3D viewing methods are not compatible, although you may be able to make a kind of an universal solution, but even the different passive solutions are not compatible with each other due to the different method of light polarization being used in each. When you look around you will see that pretty much all better looking and especially designer 3D glasses available are compatible with RealD’s projection system only. Sure you could pretty easily also find IMAX or Dolby 3D glasses, but these are usually the same not so practical and not so good looking type of 3D glasses that you get handed out when you enter the respective 3D movie theater. The IMAX 3D glasses shouldn’t be expensive and hard to produce, but most likely IMAX is not giving out license to anyone else to make designer 3D glasses compatible with their solutions, the same could also apply to Dolby 3D, although their glasses should be a bit more expensive and harder to produce due to the way their lenses work. This would of course need to change if the market of personal 3D glasses continues to grow and there is a big potential for that, although the presence of multiple formats makes it harder for the users. Depending on what format the local movie theaters around you use you may need to buy multiple different pairs of 3D glasses and if you go for more expensive designer brands such as Calvin Klein or Oakley it could turn out to be quite an expensive thing to do. And if you don’t go watching 3D movies that often it becomes even less attractive, even though there are a lot of options for personal 3D glasses that don’t cost over $100 USD…

Do you remember back in June this year Nvidia announcing that new more affordable wired 3D Vision active shutter glasses are coming? Well, if you live in the US you are able to get these cheaper wired 3D Vision glasses for a while now for $99 USD, however if you live in Europe, where there are a lot of more price-oriented markets, you are still out of luck. It appears that the wired version of the 3D Vision active shutter glasses is still yet to reach Europe and most likely other markets as well. I did manage to spot some places offering the glasses, but only in Germany and even there it isn’t easy to get a hold of them, and as expected the price in Europe is translated to 99 Euro. So it seems that we are going to have to wait a bit more for the wired version of the 3D Vision glasses to become widely available in Europe. And until then you’ll have to wait for a review of the glasses comparing them to the already available for a while and more expensive wireless counterpart.

And while you may think that the wired version of the 3D Vision glasses may be more attractive for people that consider the wireless version a bit too expensive this is not the case. There are actually a lot of people using the 3D Vision glasses professionally and although there is already a wireless 3D Vision Pro version available targeted at them, they may still prefer the wired glasses. The reason for that is due to the battery having bigger chance to fail in about a year or two in a wireless version after 8-12 hours of nonstop daily usage. So for these people the wired version could be more convenient solution in longer term, regardless of the price, and having to deal with cables is not a problem as they tend to work in front of a PC all the time anyway. Of course from the profit point of view having professional users buy the cheapest consumer version instead of the more expensive professional model is not that great, but then there is the point of what people need. Which reminds me that there is still no easy way to get your damaged or failed 3D Vision glasses repaired, like for example if you break a lens incidentally or your battery fails, as there are no spare parts for being sold anywhere. So you ultimately have to buy a new pair of glasses and the general rule is that the more complex a product is the more likely is something to fail in it over time and this makes the simpler wired 3D Vision glasses more attractive for some people… ;)

If you thought that in 2012 everyone will ditch the 3D glasses and go for glasses-free 3D products, than you were a bit too optimistic about the development of sterescopic 3D technology. Although autostereoscopic 3D technology is developing it will take at least a few years before it can compete in terms of price and features to what the glasses-based 3D products already offer. But that does not mean that the active 3D and passive 3D solutions that are already widely available, they too have some disadvantages, besides the fact that you need to wear glasses. And if we focus on the active 3D solutions, one of the most annoying things at the moment is the fact that there is no universal standard to make all glasses compatible with different hardware and pretty much everyone is making their own glasses that work only with their own 3D products. Another thing about the active 3D glasses is the fact that most of them rely on infrared signals for synchronization with the 3D HDTV or a 3D monitor. This means you need direct line of sight between the glasses and the IR emitter, the operating range is more limited, and you may get interferences in the signal from other infrared devices like from some remote control for a device for example…

Quite some time has passed and although there were a few tries to standardize the active shutter glasses for 3D products, so far we have been nowhere near achieving that important goal. The solution was for some third party manufacturers to make universal active shutter glasses that are compatible with multiple products, but that simply requires you to buy additional hardware. Things however maybe moving in the right direction after Panasonic Corporation, Samsung Electronics, Sony Corporation and X6D Limited (XPAND 3D) have announced their intent to collaborate on the development of a new technology standard for consumer 3D active glasses called “Full HD 3D Glasses Initiative”. The first three are some of the top names in the consumer 3D product market at the moments and the fourth company is one of the makers of universal 3D glasses, so if we get a few more companies to join in and we are going to be almost there achieving the standardization of the active 3D shutter glasses.

The “Full HD 3D Glasses Initiative” is targeted to be launched in September 2011, at which time the development of new standardization-applied active 3D glasses will begin, however the first universal glasses with the new IR/RF protocols will be made available in 2012. These new active shutter glasses will be using Bluetooth RF technology as wireless radio frequency medium for communication with 3D-capable display solutions, but will also be backward compatible with 2011 3D active TVs using infrared communication. If you remember a few months ago Samsung was the first company to start offering Bluetooth-based active shutter glasses that were compatible only with some of the latest generation of Samsung’s 2011 3D TVs. Hopefully this initiative will make the life of consumers using different 3D-capable products easier, but as I’ve already mentioned this will not happen before 2012, so there is still time.