Audi Commercial targeting DVRs

Real D - Digital 3D

Alright, so forget everything we said about 4K and how it will reinvigorate the movie theater industry.  Well, maybe you don't have to forget everything, but there might be something else vying for the opportunity to revive the classic cinema experience.  Braden just took his boys to see Disney's animated feature Meet The Robinsons.  A fun movie, but by itself nothing terribly overwhelming or impressive - especially when you measure it against the $54 it cost to get a seat.  The big difference maker was a new Digital 3D technology from a company called Real D.  We're talking about the smoothest, best 3D experience yet.  It's nothing like Captain EO, to compare it with another Disney 3D project.

The Digital 3D experience from Real D still requires glasses, which might seem old school.  We have seen demonstrations of 3D LCD technology that doesn't require glasses.  But those LCD experiments haven't delivered a great experience, unless you're a big fan of motion sickness and double vision.  And we aren't talking about the old red and blue glasses that gave you the same effect, motion sickness and blurry movies, and very little real 3D.  To explain the reason for the glasses, we have to give a little technical background, on the Real D process.  First, there's the projector.  They worked very hard to make it all happen using one projector, which may sound obvious, but #D usually requires one projector for the right eye information and another for the left eye, in fact that's how cameras capture the information.  In front of the camera lens, the projector uses a device called the Z-Screen that is a "a special liquid crystal modulator that polarizes the light, the left eye and right eye information, in opposite circular states."  Thus eliminating the need for two projectors.

According to Joshua Greer, the President and Co-founder of Real D in an interview at ign.com, the Real D projector also houses "a series of hardware and software drive modules that do our electronic noise reduction and synchronize the projector, and actually help juice the projector — we actually run them at 144 frames a second."  It projects onto a specially designed and engineered silver screen.  And then that comes back to those glasses.  They aren't the traditional red and blue glasses, but instead hold lenses that are "a specially polarized type of eyewear called circular polarized lens, which is very different from traditional 3-D in that it allows you to tip your head without losing the 3-D effect — something you can't do with typical 3-D systems."  This is very cool.  They allow you to watch the movie just like you'd watch any other movie, turn your head to see something somewhere else on the screen any time you want, the effects go with you.

If you go see Meet the Robinsons, you'll get to see an animated classic Disney short film feature the lovable chipmunks Chip and Dale and everyone's favorite Disney duck, Donald.  It was produced by Walt Disney in the 1950s and really shows how far 3D technology has come over the past half century.  The really amazing stuff isn't in the short film, or even in Meet the Robinsons, although the feature itself was great.  What blows you away are the intros.  Real D has put together a Digital 3D intro that really showcases what they can do, quite simply it's amazing.  Then you top that off with the Dolby Digital intro and you absolutely can't wait for the movie to start.  Dolby has created an incredibly immersing experience by joining 3D sound and video.  There's absolutely no reason to believe you aren't right there in the adventure.  In fact, you could probably compare the Real D movie experience to Dolby Digital itself.  If you can remember how fun it was to watch your first surround sound movie, this will change you concept of movie viewing just as much.  And today you can't go to a movie without hearing it in some sort of 5.1 or 6.1 surround, whether it be Dolby, DTS or even SDDS.  Real D is counting on their technology to be just as prevalent in a few years.

But who really goes to see animated movies?  The answer is a lot of people, but, of course, not everyone.  Lately people have been flocking to the theaters to see movies like Spider-man 3 and the latest installment of the Pirates of the Caribbean.  If you think about it, those movies, although they use real actors, are in some ways just as digital as an animated film, after all the effects get added to the movie.  It should be pretty easy to make Spidey hang down over you or have Captain Jack's sword fly just over your head.  And they're working on live action as well.  A company called 3ality Digital recently produced a film covering several U2 concerts in three dimensions; called U2-3D they plan to screen it at the Cannes film festival later this month.  They had to use two cameras per angle to capture the right eye and left eye information, but were able to get them mounted in such a way that it was very close to just filming a regular 2D shoot.  By all accounts it came out to be amazing, Meet the Robinsons on steroids, if you will.

Real D is planning to have 6,000 to 10,000 theaters fitted with the 3D technology by 2009.  They will be needed for the 15 to 20 movies Hollywood is planning to release using the technology that year alone.  If they hit the 20 number, or possibly go even higher, we're looking at a new 3D movie available every two weeks or so.  At $54 a family, and that's a matinee price (yes there are special fees to cover the glasses and such), a lot of us won't be able to see them all.  But we'll want to see a few, and that's what Disney is counting on.  Disney, and a laundry list of other Hollywood big shots Real D claims are interested in using the technology, people like James Cameron, Peter Jackson, George Lucas, Bob Zemeckis.  But since we won't be able to see them all, there's got to be a way to push this technology into the living room.  For now, the studios will want to use it to draw you back to the theater.  You've got to think, though, that there are a few big name electronics companies that would like to use a technology like this to get you to buy a new TV or two.  That will be fun stuff.