TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/041690/0416310.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.2 KB | 108 lines

                                                                                TECHNOLOGY, Page 77

Grab Your Goggles, 3-D Is Back!


Eye-popping realism gives new life to an old craze

By PHILIP ELMER-DEWITT -- With reporting by Seiichi Kanise/Osaka


    The first three-dimensional-movie craze earned the
technology a bad reputation that has lasted for decades. The
hundred or so 3-D feature films and short subjects produced
between late 1952 and early 1954 rarely rose above the
spear-chucking Bwana Devil or the gore-splattered Creature from
the Black Lagoon. But what really killed 3-D in the '50s -- and
in subsequent revivals in the '60s, '70s and '80s -- was not
so much bad movies as bad 3-D. Even classics like Kiss Me Kate
and Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder have effects that when seen
in 3-D, tend to pull the eyeballs in directions that nature
never intended. Successful 3-D movies require that two
stereoscopic images be kept scrupulously aligned and in focus,
and this technological challenge has virtually overwhelmed a
generation of filmmakers.

    Until now. Exploiting advances in computer graphics,
liquid-crystal technology and extra-wide-format films, a
Canadian company has developed a new technique that makes
objects pop out of the screen with unprecedented clarity and
brilliance and causes no eyestrain. The new technology, called
Imax Solido, was created by Imax Systems, the Toronto-based
company that makes movies to be shown on screens the size of
six-story buildings. The first Solido film, a largely
computer-generated extravaganza called Echoes of the Sun that
was co-produced by the Japanese firm Fujitsu, opened last week
at the Fujitsu Pavilion at Expo '90, an international fair in
Osaka. Showgoers queued up for a chance to park themselves in
front of a huge wraparound screen, strap on a pair of
battery-powered goggles and enter a startlingly realistic 3-D
world.

    The goggles are the key to the Solido system. Taking the
place of the funny cardboard-frame glasses used to watch
old-style 3-D movies, the eyewear creates a stereoscopic effect
by using lenses filled with liquid-crystal diodes, the same
material that forms the numerals on the face of a digital
wristwatch. When jolted by an electrical current, an LCD lens
can instantly switch from being essentially transparent to
being totally opaque -- like an efficient electronic shutter.
Controlled by an infrared signal broadcast from the projection
booth, the goggles' left and right lenses open and close 24
times a second, in synchronization with a pair of Imax
projectors showing first the left-eye view and then the
right-eye view of any scene. The 3-D effect is unusually crisp
because the projectors are extremely stable, the separation of
right- and left-eye views is precise, and the movie frames are
ten times as large as those of a typical 35-mm film.

    But it is the wide, umbrella-shape screen that provides the
real breakthrough in Solido. When the brain combines the left-
and right-eye images in a conventional 3-D movie, it creates
by a process known as stereopsis an artificial
three-dimensional space that seems to jut out from the screen.
As an object in that space approaches the viewer, it becomes
larger and larger. If it gets big enough to reach the outer
edges of the picture, however, it will appear to snap back to
the plane of the screen, sending conflicting depth cues to the
brain and destroying the 3-D illusion. The advantage of the
wraparound Solido theater is that the edges of the screen are
beyond the audience's field of view. "The screen seems to
disappear in the peripheral vision," says Imax producer Roman
Kroitor. "The picture stays right there; you can reach out and
touch it."

    The Solido system is just the latest in a series of advances
in 3-D technologies, from laser-generated holographic images
to experimental helmets equipped with tiny TV screens for each
eye. There are 3-D video games, 3-D still cameras and
double-lens camcorders for people who want to make their own
3-D home videos. One enterprising California firm, 3-D TV of
San Raphael, markets a $189.95 "video lunch box" that includes
stereoscopic goggles, a 3-D videocassette and a plug-in adapter
that permits 3-D movies from the past to be shown on today's
VCRs. "Interest in 3-D has never been greater," says 3-D TV
founder Michael Starks, whose offerings include Cat Women of
the Moon (1953), Outlaw Territory (1953) and The Stewardesses
(1969), a lame R-rated  adult film that is reputed to be the
biggest-grossing 3-D movie of all time.

    Are these the makings of another '50s-style 3-D movie boom?
Probably not. The backlist of conventional 3-D films is still
pretty limited, and titles like It Came from Outer Space and
Friday the 13th Part 3 have not improved with age. Imax Systems
has installed a 3-D theater in Vancouver and has plans to build
two more, in Galveston, Texas, and Taiwan, but there are no
plans yet to put them in typical suburban malls. Moreover, as
glorious as the new technology may seem today, it is likely to
be perceived by an increasingly jaded public as just another
gimmick. "People get used to things so fast," says Imax's
Kroitor. "After a while they ask, `Where's 4-D?'"