3DTV: The Next Big Thing?

Now that we’ve got HDTV, what’s next? Look no further than your local movie theater; 3D is coming to a living room near you.Hollywood has noticed the runaway success of 3D movies at the box office; the 3D versions often account for as much as two-thirds of the ticket sales, even though the 2D versions appear on far more screens. About 15 major feature films will be released in 3D in 2009, with twice that number scheduled for 2010.That means for the first time, we'll have Hollywood entertainment content ready to be piped into home theaters. A Consumer Electronics Association survey noted that 50 percent of consumers are willing to pay extra to get 3D functionality on their TVs. So it should come as no surprise that HDTV manufacturers are scrambling to support 3DTV.As it turns out, plasma and 120Hz LCD technology are both adaptable to 3DTV using active glasses, which are different from the passive glasses used in most 3D movie theaters. Active glasses use LCD material to block the light to one eye, then the other, at very fast rates. By synchronizing them to the content on the HDTV, full-resolution 1080p images can be presented sequentially to the left and right eyes, and still have a total frame rate of 60Hz. (In general, speeds of 60Hz or better are required to prevent annoying flicker in the images.) Panasonic has announced a version of this scheme for plasma TVs.Other technologies can be used to show 3D images with either passive glasses or no glasses at all, but these are currently too expensive to manufacture or have significant viewing limitations, and thus are less likely to be successful, at least for the next few years.