by Shirley Gooding

Created on: April 03, 2009   Last Updated: April 04, 2009

One trend that is frightening to me in this technology media age is the propulsion toward 3-D entertainment. Not only are more movies being produced geared toward this new genre, there is talk that telvision will start boasting such shows. For example, according to an article appearing in the Los Angeles Times, Jan. 5, 2009, the National Football League aired a 3-D game between the Oakland Raiders and the San Diego Chargers, that was broadcast to select theaters with 3-D capacity. The normal venue for such games are the television set ensconced in a living room.

I can understand why studios want to produce the more expensive shows (3-D can cost up to 15% more in production costs) as they are generally box-office hits, which translate into big money for the effort. However what concerns me is the fact that in order to get any benifit from the 3-D experience a viewer must be able to see with two eyes. The classic red/blue glasses made of paper are not helpful to those who have monocular vision. And the modern equivalent which are essentially miniature LCD screens that flicker at high speeds could pack a double whammy for people who are monocular and epileptic as the flickering could set off seizures and still does not allow a person with vision in one eye see in 3-D. In order to reap the benifit of all that flickering one must see the different images that are filtered to each eye. Again, it is still an impossibility for those who have only monocucular vision.

The entertainment industry will effectively wipe out a source of pleasure for an already ignored segment of the population if it continues with it's trend to make everything "3-D". Some companies have progressed to the point of making 3-D ready televison sets. It is bad enough we Americans will lose our analog broadcasts in June, 2009 unless one subscribes to a cable or satellite TV service or buys a converter box. Why is the entertainment industry trying to make television worthless to many more citizens by subscribing only to a 3-D format?

In the olden days, so-called stereoscopic images were created by filtering out different color bands for the left and right eyes in order to form the illusion that the viewer was seeing in 3-D. Modern technology now presents full color images to each eye. By wearing a pair of LCD lenses that alternately opens and closes the left and right lenses in tandem with the screen at speeds as high as 1/60th of a second, according to the Times article previously alluded to. The article further states that another version of the glasses used polarized lenses that seperate and filter left-eye and right-eye images. A third method mentioned that does not require glasses, but requires viewers to be within a narrow range of the television to get the desire effect was autostereoscopic displays. These create visual barriers between each pixel so that left-eye images are seen only by the left eye and right-eye images are seen only in the right eye. None of these methods, old or modern will help those that have only one functioning eye. Until they can come up with something that will allow everyone to see in 3-D, I hope the industry will reconsider such tactics as broadcasting only 3-Dimesional programing.

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