with 3D TV, suddenly all other TVs look so boring

I just had an experience on Friday. Not a life changing experience, but one of those experiences where you never look at something significant, the same way again. In my case it was the TV. I had gone down to our Philips staff shop to check some monitors. Along the way, inadvertently I glanced at the demo TV in the lobby which is always running some boring corporate propaganda crap (sorry corp. comm guys :P ). But this time I literally could not draw my eyes away from it. I could see things "deep" into the TV, and there were objects coming right at me straight out of the TV!

I could not move myself from there for the next 10 mins. Some of my friends had told me how they saw 3D images coming at them after they've had some opium, but I could swear this TV was not running on opium! (anti-narcotics folks if you guys are reading this blog, those friends are not from Singapore, one is german and the other is his american wife and the opium they had was somewhere in Indonesia I believe, at an undisclosed location).

I've seen 3D movies before, with those ancient plastic color glasses. This was totally different. I wore no glasses and whichever angle I looked at it from it was bright and with dramatic depth perception. It looked like any ordinary big flat LCD TV just that everything looked as though its right in front of me, I could just walk into the TV (not advisable) or I could practically reach forward and grab objects or errr... people (ahem!).
I had heard of technology demos of 3D TV based on polarized filters even as far back as 15 years ago. So this did not catch me as much of a shocker, but its just the experience of watching it myself for the first time and its really not an experience to get over easily. Every TV that I looked at after this suddenly looked so boring like there is really something missing. Kinda like when you have to watch TV without sound or without color, the difference is more significant than that. I wish I could post some of the 3D clips here but errm... your monitor does not support stereoscopic viewing does it? Sadly mine doesnt either. Right now these TVs are only available for "Institutional" clients and not quite a consumer product yet (philips.com/3d).

How the thing works is that it's producing 9 different images of each frame (I guess in future this would be much higher number of images as the refresh rates get better), and your brain merges those images to perceive depth i.e. make them look like real life objects. Just like your two eyes are looking at two different images at every moment and your brain merges them both to show things in 3D. Although my brother claims he sees everything in 3D even when he closes one eye. Yea I hope either I can get his 3D eye (in case I lose one of mine), or he gets to have my brain (he's obviously lost his).

I hope I dont have to wait another 15 years to watch Battle Star Galactica in high definition 3D! Woohoo! hmm and if David Hasselhoff is reading this blog I am sure everyone know whats going to be on his mind "Babewatch 3D" coming right at ya! Maybe we should have a poll: "who would you like to watch running in slow motion in a swimsuit in full 3D?"

Bilal
http://elanist.com/bilal