James Cameron, Panasonic Team Up for 3-D TVs

If you haven't heard, James Cameron really wants you to see stuff in 3-D. His passion project has helped him develop this year's Avatar, which enjoyed huge crowds for the 15-minute IMAX Avatar Day on Friday. But he's not just stopping with movies. Cameron is throwing some of his considerable fortune at promoting the idea of 3-D televisions. The Hollywood Reporter writes that Cameron has partnered with Panasonic, which is developing a new line of flat-panel sets and Blu-ray disc players to accommodate what would be the second major shift in television programming specifications in five years. And this isn't something we're looking at five, six years down the road, although that might be when it becomes more widespread; Panasonic will start selling the TVs next year, if you can believe it. "I believe 3-D is how we will experience movies, gaming and computing in the near future. 3-D is not something you watch. It's a reality you feel you could step into," Cameron said this week. There is still some question, though, whether or not people really want that kind of reality or if part of the unabated popularity of films and television is that you are by definition observing passively rather than actively. Gaming, I have no doubt, will fully embrace 3-D when it becomes more feasible. There is also the problem of standards for the 3-D. After all, it took the federal government and the manufacturers of TVs over a decade to determine what HD standard would officially be adopted. The Japanese were flaunting HDTV at American trade shows nearly 20 years ago. If you're wondering, yes, you'd need the glasses, and innovations like the remote control and portable audio devices certainly lay groundwork for the feeling that eventually, wearing glasses to watch TV could be second nature, as silly as it seems today.

Comments

[MRPigg]

If they could develop the same technology for home televisions as they have for current digitally projected 3D, that would be fine by me. The problem with "TV 3D" is that the red and blue or red and green or whatever colored lenses take away the colors of the film entirely and are much more of a strain on your eyes.
I don't understand why this can't happen. Current 3D technology uses a digital image, and all current televisions now receive nothing but digital images, right? So what's the difference?

[hampshire]

Awesome man !!!!!!!!!!!!!!! i love the trail..

[kz]

it isn't just a digital image its a sterioscopic image and tvs cant produce them at a quick enough rate the glasses work by blocking out image in one eye at a time and it alternates so rapidly that it tricks your eyes into seeing the 3d image tvs cant change images quick enough to keep up with it although they've already started to make tvs that can