People have been talking about 3D technology a lot, but some of us may think that the technology is already deadly before it becomes mature. 3D technology is often considered as an enhanced way to view digital video, but it actually has been around for decades. In general, we see our environment in true 3D, there are three dimension elements of all objects, including height, width and depth. So, 3D perception is something quite natural for average human. Unfortunately, much of human-produced multimedia content is displayed in 2D, so, people have been trying to simulate 3D effects on these contents. Being able to see 3D content means that we are able to see the depth of objects. With the sense of depth, our brain will be able to automatically calculate the dimension of the objects, by combining slightly different perspectives of the objects taken by right and left eyes.
If we see a nearby object by seeing it alternately with right and left eyes, we could see that they look different. Our brain combines these two slightly different images to create 3D perception. This is also the basic concept of 3D movie and it about using two cameras or more to produce images that simulate our normal perception. Making 3D movies should be quite simple and it is about using multiple cameras that are fixed together. Creating 3D content requires reliable software, which can integrate pictures to produce desired results. Producing 3D content is one thing, but displaying it to users is another. This is a technological aspect that we need to discuss and the simplest 3D implementation for users is probably those tacky red and blue glasses to allow us see pseudo-3D experience.
In reality, 3D implementations based on these very cheap glasses can be shockingly poor and all we can see is just shades of blue and red. It is all boil down to seeing true 3D content with full color representations. Since, standard TV screens show us similar images and colors for both eyes, 3D can be difficult on them. If we want to have any kind of decent 3D implementation then we need to use proper tools. There are things that we need to have when implementing 3D technology. One of the cheapest is passive polarized glasses. It means, light beams will point only to one direction. Normal lights are distributed randomly and travel in all different directions. With polarized filter, only light that goes to specific direction is allowed to pass. Specific arrangement of polarized filters can be used to create 3D representations.
In this case, specific light beams are filtered out, so each of our eyes will see slightly different images that can be integrated with our brain to produce 3D representations. This is the most affordable and simplest of true 3D implementations and typically much better than the usual red and blue glasses. Polarized filters can be used to depict 3D content, but it is probably insufficient for full-length movies. Glasses with polarized filters are still light and affordable to produce.