Grab Your Goggles, 3-D Is Back!

By Philip Elmer-DeWitt

The first three-dimensional-movie craze earned the technology a bad reputation that has lasted for decades. The hundred or so 3-D feature films and short subjects produced between late 1952 and early 1954 rarely rose above the spear-chucking Bwana Devil or the gore-splattered Creature from the Black * Lagoon. But what really killed 3-D in the '50s -- and in subsequent revivals in the '60s, '70s and '80s -- was not so much bad movies as bad 3-D. Even classics like Kiss Me Kate and Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder have effects that when seen in 3-D, tend to pull the eyeballs in directions that nature never intended. Successful 3-D movies require that two stereoscopic images be kept scrupulously aligned and in focus, and this technological challenge has virtually overwhelmed a generation of filmmakers.

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 at Expo '90, an international fair in Osaka. Showgoers queued up for a chance to park themselves in front of a huge wraparound screen, strap on a pair of battery-powered goggles and enter a startlingly realistic 3-D world.

The 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 a second, in synchronization with a pair of Imax projectors showing first the left-eye view and then the right-eye view of any scene. The 3-D effect is unusually crisp because the projectors are extremely stable, the separation of right- and left-eye views is precise, and the movie frames are ten times as large as those of a typical 35-mm film.

But it is the 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 the 3-D illusion. The advantage of the wraparound Solido theater is that the edges of the screen are beyond the audience's field of view. "The screen seems to disappear in the peripheral vision," says Imax producer Roman Kroitor. "The picture stays right there; you can reach out and touch it."

The 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's VCRs. "Interest in 3-D has never been greater," says 3-D TV founder Michael Starks, whose offerings include Cat Women of the Moon (1953), Outlaw Territory (1953) and The Stewardesses (1969), a lame R-rated adult film that is reputed to be the biggest-grossing 3-D movie of all time.

Are these the makings of another '50s-style 3-D movie boom? Probably not. The backlist of conventional 3-D films is still pretty limited, and titles like It Came from Outer Space and Friday the 13th Part 3 have not improved with age. Imax Systems has installed a 3-D theater in Vancouver and has plans to build two more, in Galveston, Texas, and Taiwan, but there are no plans yet to put them in typical suburban malls. Moreover, as glorious as the new technology may seem today, it is likely to be perceived by an increasingly jaded public as just another gimmick. "People get used to things so fast," says Imax's Kroitor. "After a while they ask, 'Where's 4-D?' "

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CREDIT: TIME Diagram by Joe Lertola

CAPTION: HOW IT WORKS

With reporting by Seiichi Kanise/Osaka