A bit of porn, a bit of sport: that is what the French are hoping will sell 3D TV. The porn bit may be out here due to government interference, but as South Africans are traditionally sports mad, who knows.

In March I wrote a blog about the arrival of 3D TV in time for the World Cup - 3D: are you ready. Well, it has arrived, but what actually do you get for your R45k?

In a nutshell, very little. If you think back to the early days of stereo (yes, people listened to radios and LP in mono: stereo was just too expensive), a common trick by suppliers to save costs, and the fact that the radio stations did not broadcast in stereo, was to artificially create a stereo-type effect. They did this by delaying the sound to one channel by a few micro-seconds. Your ears (and as with 3D TV requiring 2 eyes, stereo required 2 ears) picked up the slight difference between channels, and voila: stereo!

3D TV uses a slightly more advanced form of this trick - 2D to 3D conversion. At present there is very little 3D content. In South Korea, one of the most advanced countries for consumer electronics, it was estimated you may get 7 hours per day of 3D content(see  Akihabara news). That's all. And one industry insider has stated that there is onle one true Blu-Ray 3D DVD out, with, maybe another 70 by year end. And that one is for a children cartoon program(report by cnet).

2D to 3D Conversion uses a technology that analyses pixels to determine spatial orientation, and then to compensate for the depth required. Now this sound intrinsically difficult. A pixel is inherently flat: it has colour, that is all. Some nifty technology to compare with surrounding pixels is required to determine true location. Even humans get confused - depth perception errors, optical illusions, are all caused when we cannot see in 3D or cannot make the conversion from 2D to 3D.

When this is couple with admissions by 3D TV makers that there is no set of standards (remember VHS vrs Betamax, HD vrs BluRay), that each different make will require slightly different set of glasses, etc.....

I'll wait : till next year at least.

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