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IT Broadcast and Digital Cinema: TRIDIX Brings 3-D to DVDs (via VRoot.org)

TRIDIX claims to offer a solution to taking a 3D movie (not necessarily an older movie that might have 3D added as an afterthought), encoding it onto a DVD, and playing it on your standard CRT, LCD, plasma, or other monitor or TV. They do this with cheap disposable glasses that come with the DVD.

So how can they possibly pull this off? Well, there’s a modern twist on those red/green cellophane glasses we remember from the old crop of 3D movies. The reason that old trick works is that the red and green color channels are separable — you can create a single pixel with independent red and green intensity values, rendered simultaneously with one projector, and use the red/green filters over your eyes to separate the two bits of information out for each eye to see a slightly different picture. The problem, of course, is that one eye is seeing only red+blue and the other is seeing only green+blue, and that’s disconcerting, especially if either eye is visually dominant.

The modern trick says, lets use more sophisticated color filters such that we still give each eye an independent color, but let’s split up the color spectrum more evenly. Imagine the red and green channels are divided into 10 zones, with each eye’s filter doing the even or odd sections. The result, with some required pre-filtering of the images to offset the resulting errors, is stereo viewing with much better color rendition to each eye, better combination of both in 3D, and no gaps or flicker, like you’d get with active stereo methods (which use spatial or temporal multiplexing for half the resolution in space or time). The color method is essentially multiplexing in color-space, which should be less noticeable. (here’s a powerpoint presentation that explains Infitec passive and active if you want to understand it better.)

The problem is, until now, this method of complex color combination using passive (cheap, simple, non-flickering) glasses has required two projectors shining on a single screen, which obviously wouldn’t work on your old TV. It’ll be interesting to see how TRIDX can encode a single pixel with enough information to supply two different full RGB colors to each eye.

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