3D is more than just another dimension

Like it or not, 3D is going to be big. It's also going to be a headache for viewers and content producers, literally if the current techniques don't improve radically.

Does it have a role in digital signage? Yes, in specialised formats.

It's actually been around for five or six years now, in the form of lenticular displays - much like the old "animated" postcards you used to be able to buy, that showed two or more different scenes as you rotated the card. Of course the resolution suffers, and the animation quality isn't great; but it's an effective low-tech method of grabbing people's attention.

Whether it turns into a mainstream medium depends on how much the display technology improves, what it costs, and how easy or difficult it is to make the content. There's a big move in Hollywood towards 3D movie making, and perhaps some of this enthusiasm will filter into the advertising domain.

But I think there's a much bigger use for 3D technology. And it's nothing to do with watching adverts in 3D.

You see, if you're filming in 3D, then you must be using more than one lens. And you'll end up with a recording of the same scene from two different viewpoints.

As processing gets cheaper and more abundant, it's going to become trivially easy to use the image from one lens to "correct" any deficiencies in the other lens. By having a way to compare between the two lenses, you have the means to correct the image in either of them.

I would imagine that lenses are by far the most expensive part of any camera system. They are precision devices that are less amenable to mass production than, say, a sensor, or a circuit board.

Modern professional lenses are simply so good, though, that you might think they don't need correcting.

That's largely true of Prime lenses, but zoom devices often have quite severe problems at their extreme ranges.

So, you could either use 3d-facilitated correction to allow you to film at the more extreme ends of a lens's performance envelope, or you could make an even bigger difference by using much cheaper lenses in the first place, and use each to correct the other.

In fact, you might even end up with a "cluster" of very cheap lenses, that, together, can give an outstanding picture.

There are much further reaching techniques than these, which I'll deal with in a future post.