Getting to know 3D part 1

This is not your grandmother even your mother 3D anymore. 3D technology has come a long way. The first confirmed 3-D film shown to a paying audience was The Power of Love, which premiered at the Ambassador Hotel Theater in Los Angeles on September 27, 1922. The camera rig was a product of the film's producer, Harry K. Fairall, and cinematographer Robert F. Elder. Power of Love was also the first film to used projected dual-strip in the red/green anaglyph format, giving us those funky cheap red/blue classes of pre-HD 3D era.

Tons of shit has changed since 1922. 3D began it's re-emergence around the early 1960s with new technology called Space-Vision 3D, stereoscopic films were printed with two images, one above the other, in a single academy ratio frame, on a single strip, and needed only one projector fitted with a special lens. This so-called "over and under" technique eliminated the need for dual projector set-ups, and produced widescreen, but darker, less vivid, polarized 3-D images thus Stereoscopic 3d was born.

The 1960-1970 also saw the most profitable 3d movie ever made. In 1970, Stereovision, a new entity founded by director/inventor Allan Silliphant and optical designer Chris Condon produce a movie called The Stewardesses. The Stewardesse only cost about $100,000 to produced. Stereovision's The Stewardesse ran for up to a year in several markets, eventually earning $27 million in North America, alone in fewer than 800 theaters making it one of the most profitable movies ever.

The 1980's brought us IMAX and IMAX3D. The first IMAX 3-D fiction film was the 45-minute Wings of Courage (1995), by director Jean-Jacques Annaud, about the author and pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Hollywood cought on fast about the potential of 3D and a few of our original favorites came out in 3D such as, Amityville 3-D,Friday the 13th Part 3 and Jaws 3-D.

Since 1984 Hollywood has seen enormous potential to make money and help prevent piracy with 3D. We fast forward to present day, there's upward to 20+ mega budget movies in production or currently in the movie theater. Panasonic has recently opened a new 3D labs at the Panasonic Hollywood Laboratory in California to establish and develop their version of 3D Blu-ray, which they are calling "3D Full HD" (3D FHD). And the all mighty Trojan Horse the Sony PS3 may just add it as part of firmware 3.0.

They are many unforeseen forces being the Herculean push for 3D and one of these titans is RealD one of the world's preeminent leader in 3D technology. In "Getting to know 3D part 2" we will take an in dept look at RealD. (to be continue)