Just Bought An HDTV? Are You Now Ready To Buy a 3DTV?
This is a compilation of scenes from "House of Wax," a 1953 horror film about a monster (played by Vincent Price) who uses live human beings as the base for the displays in his museum. The climactic scene is about three-and-a-half minutes into this YouTube clip.
The point? Former FCC Chairman Richard Wiley thinks action scenes like this will soon be jumping out at you from the TV set in your living room, in three dimensions.
"I think it will happen, in the next few years,'' he said Tuesday afternoon at the OnScreen Media Summit, put on by Multichannel News and Broadcasting & Cable at the Edison Ballroom in New York. If it's not movies -- like "House of Wax" -- that will drive it, it will be sports, like football, he says. Or maybe a combination of sport and crime mystery, starring, say, Plaxico Burress, a wag might suggest.
That Wiley should see 3DTV coming so soon after the arrival of HDTV is notable. Wiley served from 1987 to 1995 as chairman of the FCC’s Advisory Committee on Advanced Television Service. That was the panel and the time which decided what this nation's high definition standard would be.
Right now, Texas Instruments is trying to get in the game with 3D HD sets that use its tiny mirrors on a chip technology, known as digital light processing. But to get the full effect, you have to wear "active 3D glasses,'' kind of like in movie theaters in a bygone era. When 3D did not take off.
To get around that, LG and Philips are attaching thin sheets of tiny lenses to HD TV sets, so that each eye sees slightly different pictures and the 3D effect is achieved without the use of glasses of any kind (except those you already might wear).
Here's a Philips engineer explaining the company's sans glasses approach.
Philips CEO Rudy Provoost suggested at this year's Consumer Electronics Show that its 3DTV sets would arrive within two years, which must form some basis for Wiley's forecast.
Of course, right now, 3DTV sets might cost $12,000, each.
That didn't stop HDTV sets. They, too, started at $12,000, in 1998.
But it did take a full decade for their price to come down to where a 40" set costs around $1,000.
The message: It might be more than a "few years" before 3DTV sets replace HDTV sets. After all, HDTV was first demonstrated in this country in 1981.
And 3D was in movie theaters back in 1953. It was promoted, for one of its high-profile titles, as delivering "1,001 high-tension thrills" that "come off the screen ... right at you ... in exciting third dimension."
That title, of course, was the "House of Wax."
So, the question is not whether 3DTV will arrive. The question is: how do you define "in a few years."