Written on December 22, 2011 – 5:00 pm | by Admin ISK |

There is a picture of me somewhere in one of my cupboards in which I am wearing outrageously big 3D glasses in my local cinema. I have always been a sucker for 3D movies and looking at the photo got me thinking about how the technology behind it works.

3D cinema technology seems to have been around forever. I remember seeing a few of these amazing films as a kid and when I checked out the history the first ever 3D film was shown to the public was back in the 1920s.

It turns out that there are actually quite a few different ways of making 3D films these days, and I decided to have a look to see if all of them involve big, coloured glasses or not.

Anaglyph

This was one of the older ways of doing it, and it definitely needed those glasses. It involved using two superimposed images and coloured filters. The glasses come with red and blue or red and green plastic over the eyes to cancel out the filters and achieve the effect of the action coming out toward the viewer. One of the drawbacks with this system is that the red colour often lacks quality on the screen.

Polarisation

In theory this sounds very similar to the first one on the list, as it includes superimposed images and filters. In this case you get the same image in both eyes sent out to you at different angles. You get glasses with this method too and if you, like me, went to see a few 3D movies in the 70s and 80 then there is a good chance that you saw them using this technology.

Eclipse

Here we have technology which sends you left and right sided images and glasses which close the filter on the appropriate eye at the right moment. It all sounds quite high tech but in fact it was the method used was back in those early films I mentioned in the 1920s. There is a modern twist to it now with similar LCD shutter glasses operating in a similar way, although for the moment cost issues seem to have restricted the growth of this method.

Interference

You might have heard of the Dolby 3D system or Panavision. Both of these methods use different wavelengths for the colours in the presentation. The big drawback is the cost of the equipment, although it looks like it is now getting cheaper. Hold on a minute, all of these systems so far need glasses. Is there one which will free me from them?

Autosteroscopic

This is the glass free 3D technology which looks like it is going to become big in the future. For the moment it has been restricted to laptops and computer gaming devices such as the Nintendo 3DS. However, if it continues to be successful we can expect it to move onto home television and maybe even cinema screens. Perhaps when I look back in a few years that picture of mine will appear even funnier than it does now.