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As 3-D versions of movies continue to attract an audience, it’s inevitable that film studios and consumer electronics companies want to duplicate the success at home. The time is at hand, with Sony and Panasonic recently announcing a new advanced generation of 3-D TV products that should be available within the next year in the United States.

The glasses used to achieve the 3D effect — with red-and-green lenses, infamous for inducing headaches and nausea — are used to view a type of 3-D process called "anaglyph." The stereoscopic effect, which gives 3-D video the illusion of depth, comes from two superimposed images, one green and one red, depicted from slightly different perspectives. Each of the viewer’s eyes sees the opposite colored image.

"In order to see stereoscopic 3-D you need to send a right-eye view to the right eye and a left-eye view to the left eye," said Robert Boudreau, technology development manager for display commercial technology at Corning, a supplier of glass for LCD TVs. "The 3-D effect is created in the brain once the person’s eyes see these two views."

Much-improved process
Anaglyph 3-D is often underwhelming, especially for viewers used to high-definition, 2-D material. Then there are those unpleasant sensations.
While anaglyph is available in 1080p resolution, such as the "Hannah Montana" concert Blu-ray disc, "it does strain the eyes because each eye sees different colors and it is often difficult for people to view this type of 3-D, especially if they have a dominant eye," said Boudreau.

If you've seen a 3-D movie in the theater recently, the massive leap in color fidelity and dimensional effects compared to anaglyph films is due to a newer 3-D process that uses polarized glasses and a special theater screen. Projected images for the right and left eye are alternated rapidly and the polarized glasses pick up the correct image for each eye.

Left- and right-eye images are synchronized with the LCD shutters on the glasses by a signal sent from the TV. The LCD shutters quickly block out left- and right-eye views so that each eye sees only the intended image in sequence. The technology works with both LCD and plasma HDTVs.

The active shutter approach has one critical advantage over polarized 3-D: higher resolution.

Since polarized systems use filters to display only alternate lines of the video image to each eye, the vertical resolution is cut in half and image fidelity suffers. All the available screen resolution is used in active shutter products.

Source msnbc.msn.com