A Beginner’s Guide to … 3D entertainment
Don't know your passive display from your active glasses, then read on for everything you need to know about 3D.
3D ON YOUR PC
The computer industry was ahead of the consumer electronics giants in bringing 3D to people’s homes. Back in 2008, we reviewed the Zalman ZM-M220W, a 22in LCD monitor with a polarising filter and Nvidia graphics card support to provide a 3D gaming experience. The list of supported games wasn’t huge but it gave us an exciting taste of 3D gaming’s potential.
Until recently, Nvidia’s 3D Vision system dominated the 3D PC market. It comprises a pair of LCD shutter glasses and an infrared transmitter to sync the glasses up with the picture. It also requires a compatible Nvidia graphics card and monitor. All the latest cards are supported, although it’ll need to be pretty powerful to generate two simultaneous video streams. Thanks to the way DirectX leaves rendering of game visuals to the graphics card, Nvidia is able to create the 3D effect for a long list of existing PC game titles.
The latest PC graphics cards, such as this AMD Radeon HD 6950, support 3D via their HDMI 1.4a outputs
This approach is bound to fade away soon though, with the latest cards from both Nvidia and AMD supporting the home cinema HDMI 1.4a standard. This will bring 3D gaming and movie playback on PCs in line with the latest TVs and Blu-ray players.
A 3D FUTURE?
Projector manufacturers are looking to join in the 3D home entertainment boom. A good thing, as we’ve found that a big screen is by far the best way to experience 3D, so a projector makes more sense than a medium-sized TV, and it’s far more affordable than a massive TV. The high refresh rate of DLP devices makes them more suitable at present, and you can add 3D to some existing models using the clever Optoma 3D-XL. We’re still waiting on affordable LCD-based models for home use.
It may look bland, but the Optoma 3D-XL can add 3D punch to existing projectors
TV manufacturers are making 3D a standard feature on high-end TVs this year, and probably on most mid-range models by the year after. It’s hard to see whether active shutter will win out over polarised, though we think the latter is far better bet for watching the occasional big event or movie with family and friends.
It’s also hard to judge how popular it will be, as its take up is driven by the availability and desirability of the content as much as the cost of the TVs. At the end of the day, as long as the content producers use 3D to enhance a story or event, rather than as a showboating gimmick, then we should look forward to 3D entertainment for years to come.
On the next two pages we look at how 3D content is created and how movie studios can make viewing 3D a more comfortable experience