The Complete Handbook of 3D Glasses

Chapter 1: Understanding 3D Glasses

You are holding a pair of glasses that are not for seeing. They are for preventing you from seeing, most of the time. Every pair of 3D glasses works by controlling the light that reaches your eyes, and the different technologies are simply different ways of doing that control. If you are a professional—an AV integrator, a theater manager, a lab technician, an event producer—you need to understand this basic truth before you spend a single dollar on equipment. The glasses are not the product. They are a deliberately engineered gatekeeper.

3D vision in humans relies on binocular disparity. Your eyes are about 6.5 centimeters apart, so each sees a slightly different image. The brain fuses these two images into a single picture with depth. If you hold a finger up at arm's length and look past it, you see two fingers. Your brain knows it's one finger, and it uses the disparity to judge distance. 3D glasses exploit this process. They are engineered to deliver two distinct images to your brain, one from your left eye and one from your right, in perfect synchronization with a display system that is providing alternating or offset visuals. The glasses are only half the system. They are useless without the display, and the display is degraded without them. This chapter is about why that is, and why it matters for your work.

The Four Core Technologies

There are exactly four technologies that matter in the commercial and