[net.general] 3-D TV & Movies Info

nishri (12/08/82)

The following are excerpts from an article appearing in "The Toronto Star",
November 29, 1982 by Jack Miller.

About the time old-fashioned 3-D movies were having another run last summer,
making folks wear their cheap glasses and creating more headaches than depth
perception, the University of South Carolina's Porter McLaurin, Rudy Jones,
and LeConte Cathey showed off another idea.  They hit the headlines with a 3-D
system that didn't call for glasses.  All you had to do was look at it and it
showed depth.  You could even do it with one eye tied behind your back (or
simply covered up, if you found that more comfortable.)
                      ....
In the McLaurin-Jones-Cathey system, there are still two side-by-side
cameras recording the scene.  But their pictures are not both put up  on 
the screen at the same time.  They alternate.  You see left-camera picture,
then right-camera picture, and so on - at the rate of 24 pictures a second
for film or 30 a second for TV.
                      ....
It seemed obvious at the time that such a system would be easy to use in all
television and movie production, if the trio could work out the bugs.  But
no one mentioned that, probably because one bug was so big that it seemed
the system might never be able to satisfy an audience.  In the first 
demonstrations, when they flipped back and forth between left-camera and
right-camera images, the picture on the screen wobbled from side to side.
                      ....
A few months have gone by since then, though, and Cathey tells us now that
they've smoothed out the equipment and eliminated the wobble.

Does anyone out in Netland know more about this (the "Toronto Star" is
not a technical newspaper)?  Is there a writeup with more information
someplace?  Anything I ever read on 3d suggested the perception was due
to the difference between what the right and left eye receive;  what
are the updated theories?  How is the wobble eliminated in the new version?

					Alex Nishri
					decvax!utzoo!utcsrgv!utcsstat!nishri