By Edward C. Baig
In 1915 at New York's Astor Theater, an audience wearing special red and green ''anaglyph'' spectacles paid to watch a 3-D film for the first time. According to the Guinness Book of Records, three one-reelers were shown, including a travelogue of Niagara Falls. The event evidently didn't make much of a splash.
The Moving Picture World journal (which ran synopses of films during the early days of cinema) reported at the time: ''Images shimmered like reflections on a lake and in its present form the method couldn't be commercial because it detracts from the plot.''
Funny, but all these decades later, I find myself wearing pricey ''shutter'' glasses over my own spectacles as I take in a couple of 3-D DVDs on a small TV set; the movies originally were exhibited on massive IMAX screens. To be sure, there is something inherently cool about characters that appear to float in midair in front of the screen, especially in my own abode. But both movies -- Ultimate G's, about a young man's desire to be a pilot, and the animated Alien Adventures -- have such lame plots that you don't have to worry about detracting from them.
Therein lies the problem with 3-D technology: The special effects are not enough. The rest of the experience must be equally engaging. I suppose that's why 3-D films have had only occasional moments in the limelight, notably a faddish period during the early 1950s, when audiences donned glasses to watch such, um, classics as House of Wax and Bwana Devil.
I learned this lesson while testing a pair of 3-D kits from a New York outfit called TrueDepthVisualization (TDV) Technologies, plus another kit called Another I's from C3D Digital in Universal City, Calif. One of TDV's kits lets you watch 3-D movies on any television, assuming the original material was filmed that way. The other is aimed at providing 3-D on the Internet.
TDV's ambition is to turn TDV3D.com into a Web portal for specially produced three-dimensional content. But at this early stage, there's not a lot of compelling content in any dimension, and 3-D content is costly to produce.
The TDV site is free, and visitors can peer at pictures in 2-D. But to view stuff in 3-D, you have to purchase one of the kits, and I have a hard time justifying the $99 price. The computer kit comes with two pairs of shutter glasses (one pair is wireless) plus software. The TV kit includes the wireless glasses and a small set-top box. Given enough decent 3-D titles, I could more easily rationalize this purchase.
The high-tech shutter glasses employed by TDV electronically open and close, on each eye, dozens of times a second. The shutters are synchronized with slightly differing views being flashed on the screen, so each eye sees a slightly offset view. Our brains fuse the views together as a 3-D image.
The overall quality of the effect varies from ''gee that's nifty'' to ''is that all there is,'' depending on the image and how it's displayed. Incidentally, you won't get 3-D on a flat panel or laptop screen; the technology is available but costly.
Neither the TV nor the PC kit is particularly difficult to set up, though on the computer side I ran into a few software-related issues. You attach a connector called a dongle to the printer port on your computer, and in turn connect the printer cable to the other end.
An infrared transmitter that also is connected to the dongle communicates with the glasses -- the battery-powered specs turn on whenever 3-D content appears at the TDV site. You may have to dig into the Windows control panel to adjust pixel count, color resolution and refresh rate of the monitor.
During installation, I received a pop-up notice in Windows XP warning me that an nVidia video driver had not passed Microsoft's testing and could ''impair or destabilize the correct operation of your system.'' This is important, because an nVidia graphics card and drivers are required to play any of the online and/or downloadable skiing and racing games found at the TDV site. I made calls to TDV and was told I could safely ignore the Windows warning; I did and everything worked fine.
TDV hopes to make a push in education, but at the moment there is a paucity of compelling 3-D content at the site. You'll find narrated stereoscopic slide shows of U.S. and foreign landmarks, plus vintage 3-D photos from World War I. Unfortunately, most of the black-and-white pictures are dark and small, and the 3-D effect isn't all that hot. The whole thing felt like a kludge; TDV's designers have left out any multimedia pizazz.
Maybe it was me, but other educational material -- pictorial tours of ''Indian Sacred Places'' (photographed by Lorran Meares) and the Intrepid Sea-Air Museum in New York, as well as NASA moon shots-- seemed to lack the requisite drama, even in 3-D, in some cases because of the size of the images.
And when I clicked on an icon to look at bugs in 3-D, I got bugs. But in lieu of caterpillars and spiders, the bug was a Shockwave ''script error'' that froze the screen. Eventually, when I was able to view the intended insects, the 3-D effects were appropriately creepy. A thin shopping section sports a few 3-D advertising pictures of Mercedes autos and Sony electronics.
More is on the way. TDV plans to produce the first 3-D beauty contest, dubbed the Miss e-World pageant. Women 18 to 25 can submit photos to be posted in 3-D; visitors vote on the winners. I can't say if this will be seductive enough to lure a crowd. But in the interest of thorough reporting, I did watch a 3-D video of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit models. Like I said before, it's all about engaging content.
Also in the hopper: a chess competition with world champ Anatoly Karpov, and a fashion show hosted by supermodel Kylie Bax.
I thought the most inspiring subjects in 3-D would be, well, you and me. And TDV includes a software plug-in for converting your own 2-D images into 3-D. But it works only with Adobe Photoshop or its simpler sibling Photoshop Elements, and the conversion is not easy to master. Coming later this month (and unavailable for testing) is software that will convert videos in the Windows Media format to 3-D, potentially opening up a lot more content.
C3D earns decent marks for its Another I's kit, whose main focus is to morph existing 2-D PC games into a virtual-reality arena, so long as the programs adhere to the DirectX or OpenGL software standards (most do these days). Indeed, with 3-D turned on -- you can toggle back and forth -- NHL 2002 and Clive Barker's Undying, both from Electronic Arts, made me feel as if I were in the middle of the action.
As with TDV, Another I's takes advantage of the nVidia graphics capabilities and employs wireless shutter goggles, which in this case were too large and kept slipping off my face. The C3D setup also was a tad more awkward than TDV's; you must fuss with a keyboard adapter along with a poorly designed monitor connector.
I'm waiting for the day when we won't need funky glasses or other add-ons to immerse ourselves in realistic multidimensional worlds. A Santa Monica, Calif., company called Dynamic Digital Depth has been demonstrating a TV 3-D system that doesn't require spectacles, aimed currently at filmmakers, marketers and Webmasters rather than the folks at home.
We can wait. What counts, in any dimension, is the depth of the stories these people have to tell.
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