Word: solido
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...reader's imagination.) The 1983 Jaws 3-D, utilizing a single-camera process called Arrivision, was an example of several horror series whose third episode was in 3-D (Friday the 13rd Part 3, Amityville 3-D). That 1990 TIME story was heralding a liquid-crystal technology called IMAX Solido. Since then, IMAX had become a reliable adjunct to the movie-theater business, both in its own documentaries and in special versions of movies like The Polar Express and The Dark Knight; but it accounts for only a small part of movie ticket sales...
Until now. Exploiting advances in computer graphics, liquid-crystal technology and extra-wide-format films, a Canadian company has developed a new technique that makes objects pop out of the screen with unprecedented clarity and brilliance and causes no eyestrain. The new technology, called Imax Solido, was created by Imax Systems, the Toronto-based company that makes movies to be shown on screens the size of six-story buildings. The first Solido film, a largely computer-generated extravaganza called Echoes of the Sun that was co-produced by the Japanese firm Fujitsu, opened last week at the Fujitsu Pavilion...
...goggles are the key to the Solido system. Taking the place of the funny cardboard-frame glasses used to watch old-style 3-D movies, the eyewear creates a stereoscopic effect by using lenses filled with liquid-crystal diodes, the same material that forms the numerals on the face of a digital wristwatch. When jolted by an electrical current, an LCD lens can instantly switch from being essentially transparent to being totally opaque -- like an efficient electronic shutter. Controlled by an infrared signal broadcast from the projection booth, the goggles' left and right lenses open and close 24 times...
...wide, umbrella-shape screen that provides the real breakthrough in Solido. When the brain combines the left- and right-eye images in a conventional 3-D movie, it creates by a process known as stereopsis an artificial three-dimensional space that seems to jut out from the screen. As an object in that space approaches the viewer, it becomes larger and larger. If it gets big enough to reach the outer edges of the picture, however, it will appear to snap back to the plane of the screen, sending conflicting depth cues to the brain and destroying...
...Solido system is just the latest in a series of advances in 3-D technologies, from laser-generated holographic images to experimental helmets equipped with tiny TV screens for each eye. There are 3-D video games, 3-D still cameras and double-lens camcorders for people who want to make their own 3-D home videos. One enterprising California firm, 3-D TV of San Raphael, markets a $189.95 "video lunch box" that includes stereoscopic goggles, a 3- D videocassette and a plug-in adapter that permits 3-D movies from the past to be shown on today...