Around 12 percent of the population struggles with depth perception, also known as stereoblindness. If you can’t see movies in 3D, you aren’t alone. Some people purchase the 3D ticket, put on the glasses, and spend the next two hours watching a flat, unfocused, two-dimensional movie, while possibly suffering from nausea or headaches. However, for some people, the effect is less than thrilling. Seeing a film in 3D gives the viewer an enhanced experience, as you completely immerse yourself in the world on the screen. While 2D remains popular, many modern movies offer a 3D option, either because they were filmed specifically in 3D or were edited in post-production. With the success of Avatar in 2009, it looked like 3D would become the default for mainstream film. This polarized lens system is used at Disneyworld and Universal Studios and in IMAX 3D theaters across the country.The first three-dimensional movies came out in the 1950s, and over the past 60 years they have continually risen and fallen in popularity. In this way, each eye sees a different image,just like you would if you were viewing the scene in real life.īecause only the polarization and not the color of light is changed, polarized lenses produce much more lifelike images than their red-and-blue predecessors. Two projectors show slightly different images, using light polarized in one or the other direction. One lens allows only vertically polarized light to pass through, while the other allows only horizontally polarized light. Like with anaglyph images, special glasses are needed to view these new 3D movies. Light is a wave made up of electric and magnetic fields that vary in time and, like the garden hose, it can be made to be vertically or horizontally polarized. Similarly, shaking the hose left to right will generate waves we call horizontally polarized. We would say this wave is vertically polarized. If you shake the hose up and down, you will generate vertical 'waves' that also move up and down. To understand polarization, think of a garden hose. Relying on the optical phenomenon of polarization, these new 3D glasses allow for more accurate color viewing than anaglyph images. While anaglyph images prevail in print media, a new technology has eclipsed the venerable red-and-blue lenses in motion pictures. Anaglyph images can be found everywhere from Disney's feature film Spy Kids 3D to the latest Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition. This disparity mimics what each eye would see in reality, as with most 3D technology.īecause the traditional red-blue glasses are inexpensive to produce, anaglyph images remain popular in modern media. The eye covered by the red lens will perceive red as "white" and blue as "black," and vice versa for the other eye. Each eye sees a slightly different image. Using a red and blue lens 'tricks' the brain into seeing a 3D image. When viewed without 3D glasses, these images will look blurry and discolored. In both cases, the images are then combined to form a single picture, or anaglyph image. Recently, the filtering is being done afterwards with a processing program like Adobe Photoshop. Traditionally, anaglyph images were taken using two slightly separated cameras, one with a red filter and one with a blue filter.
These glasses, when used with special photographs called anaglyph images, create the illusion of depth. Instead, flimsy plastic glasses with red and blue lenses usually come to mind. When most people hear the term '3D,' they don't think of stereoscopes or View-Masters. "It is truly a phenomenon that has transcended the toy box to achieve pop culture status," according to Chuck Scothon, senior vice president of marketing at Fisher-Price. The View-Master, a ubiquitous childhood toy for over 65 years, is a version of the stereoscope.
Surprisingly, even today most people are probably familiar with the technology. The stereoscope was a popular novelty in bars and arcades until around the 1930s, when film became the dominant media for entertainment. The stereoscope used lenses that merged the two distinct images into one, giving the effect of a 3D scene without straining the eyes. In the late 19th and early 20th century, the stereoscope was invented to address these issues. It requires people to "cross" their eyes, which some people cannot do or find uncomfortable.
This way, the photographs mimic what each one of our two eyes would see in reality. The images are taken by two cameras that are slightly separated. In the mid-19th century, Charles Wheatstone discovered that simply viewing a pair of similar (but not exact) images side-by-side can give the impression of three-dimensionality. The earliest forms of 3D glasses were not glasses at all.