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.
FIRING ON BOTH LENSES: CREATING 3D CONTENT
The illusion of 3D on a flat screen is only possible if the content is in 3D. One way to achieve it is to use two cameras side by side, one capturing the left-eye image and the other for the right eye. That’s easier said than done, though. Professional cameras are big, so it’s often hard or impossible to get them close enough to simulate the 6cm typical distance between humans’ eyes.
Imax’s custom-designed 3D film camera weighs over 100kg, making it extremely difficult to manoeuvre. Sky’s early experiments with 3D capture involved mounting one of the two cameras vertically, facing a mirror. The stop-motion feature film Coraline (2009) just used one camera, and for every frame it had to be shuttled across to capture an image for each eye. Even when it is possible to mount two cameras side by side, there are problems with keeping their settings and frame rates perfectly in sync.
Panasonic’s compact AG-3DA1 broadcast camera
Fortunately, digital technology has come to the rescue. Panasonic broke ground with its AG-3DA1, a dual-lens, dual-sensor HD video camera aimed at the TV broadcast market. And now there’s even 3D digital cameras and camcorders aimed at consumers, such as the Fujifilm FinePix Real 3D W3 and the Panasonic HDC-SD90 with its optional 3D lens. For a cheaper option, even the Nintendo 3DS can take 3D images and show them on its glasses-free display.
One of Fujifilm’s range of 3D cameras, complete with 3D display on the rear
Computer-animated films such as Monsters vs Aliens are relatively easy to produce in 3D. Because the actors, sets and camera are all virtual, no extra technology is required to produce two points of view a few virtual centimetres apart. Pixar was even able to go back to the original animation data for Toy Story and Toy Story 2 and render them again in 3D for a new theatrical release in 2009.
Converting existing live-action films from 2D to 3D is much harder because the depth information must be added manually, but it has been done. Special effects experts Industrial Light and Magic produced a 3D version of The Nightmare Before Christmas in 2006, 13 years after the original was released. Meanwhile, after the success of 3D spectacles such as Avatar, Warner Bros decided to re-master two of its big films for 2010 (Clash of the Titans and the latest Harry Potter film) for 3D, even though both were shot using normal cameras.
3D games designers have the easiest ride, as not only are the graphics created in a virtual environment, but that environment is generated in real time as the game is being played. Because of the way DirectX works, games don’t even have to support 3D explicitly because it’s the graphics card’s job to turn the 3D geometry, textures and lighting into images on the screen.