3D films: a different perspective from Computex

The old-fashioned red and blue 'anaglyph' glasses pictured above are probably, still, what many people think of when they think about 3D movies.

Despite new technology (the far superior polarised-lens glasses) and huge investment, 3D still hasn't quite caught the public's imagination, much to the chagrin of the companies spending enormous amounts of money promoting it.

On the show floors at the Computex trade show in Taipei, 3D is doing a roaring trade. There are 3D products everywhere, from all sorts of manufacturers. One of them, Master Image 3D of Hollywood, was hard at work today convincing the Computex Innovation Forum that 3D was indeed the way forward. 

Master Image's British boss, Roy Taylor (executive vice president and general manager of 3D display) told the forum that recent reports of falling audiences for 3D cinema releases were selectively picking films that had failed and ignoring ones that had been successful, such as Marvel Comics/Paramount's Thor, which took $66 million in its opening weekend, 60 per cent of which was accounted for by 3D ticket sales. Mr Taylor said: "Just because one 3D movie is not a huge success, that doesn't mean there's an issue with 3D. It probably means there's an issue with the movie."

The New York Times thinks differently - a story in Sunday's edition (which made it across the Pacific in time for today's International Herald Tribune here in Taipei) reckons the failure of several recent 3D titles has sent "ripples of fear" across Hollywood.

Mr Taylor was not to be deterred, pointing out that 3D has other advantages to the studios: because of higher ticket prices, the industry last year reversed a 20-year decline in average ticket prices. He also pointed out that with piracy rampant "you can't take a camcorder into a cinema and record a 3D movie because what you get is gobbledegook". However, a lot of film piracy is in the form of 'rips' taken from DVD or Blu-ray discs rather than the inferior copies made by people sneaking camcorders into cinemas, so it's unlikely 3D will have much impact on piracy.

Master Image is in talks with airlines and car makers to put its glasses-free 3D screens into seat-backs all over the world, Mr Taylor said. Outside the conference hall one of the screens was on display. The quality of the 3D effect was really very impressive - but only once you stand in the 'sweet spot'. Otherwise there was a lot of 'ghosting' where both parts of the 3D image appear at once. That's why Master Image sees its technology as a single-viewer affair for now, said Matt Liszt, the company's vice president of marketing, who was manning the stand.

Mr Taylor made an interesting point about the quality of the films, saying that the quality of 3D films is about to get "dramatically better". At the moment, there are around 150,000 cinema screens in the world, of which no more than 10 per cent are 3D-capable. "The 3D you get at the moment is all depth, going backwards from the screen" and that's because the studios don't want audiences for 2D screens having to sit through special effects that look "broken" without that third dimension. "They don't want the film critics to say to their audiences, 'only watch this film in 3D" because they'll lose 90 per cent of their viewers.

But he reckons that by Christmas 2012 half of all American and European cinemas will be 3D-enabled. "As we reach the tipping point when a movie financier can say there's only a small chance you can't see this in 3D, then we'll start to see an improvement in quality."

He also reeled off a pair of unlikely claims: that "every single smartphone manufacturer in the world is going to launch a 3D smartphone before Christmas. In addition nearly every single tablet manufacturer is either planning or is going to launch a 3D tablet."

If that's true, it's certainly a sign that the technology industry isn't going to give up easily on 3D.