Trioscopics

As the wave of CES hype for 3D in the living room recedes, it’s worth contemplating the fact that Hollywood still needs an interim format for delivering stereographic content to consumers. You could argue that releasing movies in the old-fashioned anaglyphic format is a bad move because it exposes viewers to a less-than-ideal home 3D viewing experience. But as long as a movie exists in a stereo version, the major studios are unlikely to leave money on the table by failing to release it on DVD and/or Blu-ray. That’s why John Lowry, best known for his namesake, the high-end digital-restoration company Lowry Digital (now owned by India’s Reliance Big Entertainment), has been working on making anaglyphic 3D better — brighter, more colorful, less headache-inducing. His new company, Trioscopics, has updated the old red-and-blue glasses with a green-and-magenta scheme that fine-tunes the technology with an eye for making 3D at home as good as it can possibly be as the consumer-electronics industry transitions to next-generation systems. We asked Lowry to fill us in.

StudioDaily: What’s the business case for an anaglyphic 3D system now?

John Lowry: The only reason I am involved is because of the business case. If I can help people make money, some of it is going to rub off on me. Anaglyphic 3D has been around for something like 150 years. We were working on technology to convert 2D [movies] to 3D three years ago now, and we did some very successful tests. I was amazed at how good the results could be. But it required a home market. Nobody is going to take a 2D movie, convert it to 3D, and put it in normal theatrical distribution.

Hasn’t Disney done just that, year after year, with The Nightmare Before Christmas?

Yes, but that’s Disney. You don’t take Casablanca and switch it to 3D and play it in theaters. Without a home distribution channel, the business case is shaky, and very little has been done over the last few years. We set about looking at anaglyphic technology for the home in a totally new, serious way, and we’ve been having some success. Probably the best [example] in the marketplace is “Bob’s Big Break,” a 15-minute short on the Monsters vs. Aliens Blu-ray Disc. It looks pretty darned good. The first [home video release we worked on] was Journey to the Center of the Earth, two years ago, and the quality was very shaky back then. We’ve finished a total of seven movies, and we’re working on an eighth. With a continuing R&D program, the results we’re getting now are very good in any environment.

And the wave of hype over next-generation 3D has just hit.

We’re doing a movie that you can put on DVD or BD or broadcast or VOD. You can do it today — not next year, or the year after, or the year after that. All you need is inexpensive glasses. So far with the discs we’ve shipped — Journey to the Center of the Earth, Coraline, My Bloody Valentine, Monsters Vs. Aliens — we have shipped 65 to 70 million pairs of glasses into the marketplace, and we keep getting more orders. We had orders last month for Journey.

Everybody’s talking about something that will revolutionize 3D in the home, and I believe, over time, that system will be in place in a lot of homes. But it’s going to take something like three years for it to become a commercially viable market — for you to have enough homes with that equipment to ship a Blu-ray Disc and make money at it. There’s no point in selling into a market where only studio executives can watch the discs.

So what’s the big improvement in Trioscopics’ technology compared to other anaglyphic systems?

My life has circled around image processing for many years, since the 1970s, so we looked at it from an image-processing perspective. What do you have to do, from a color-science perspective, to get the two eyes working properly? The first thing is you’ve got to match the brightness of the left and right eyes. With red-and-cyan, what people call standard anaglyph, the red eye gets about half the light that’s going to the cyan eye. That’s where your headaches start. The ColorCode system is blue in one eye and a yellow kind of color in one eye, and there is something like three or four stops difference between the eyes. You are, in fact, legally blind looking through your right eye with those glasses. Look at an eye chart. You can’t read the thing. So the first thing you’ve got to do is something dumb simple: match the brightness.

Our colors are green and magenta. You get a full range of colors, including excellent face tones. It’s beautiful. On critical viewing, our system gives full 3D depth as good as any theatrical system today. The resolution in the left and right eye is approximately equivalent to what you get in 1080p on a Blu-ray Disc. We’ve made some good pictures.

But it’s going to be a struggle for you to get the word out if all the buzz is about the new technology.

It will, ultimately, be competitive with what I’m doing. Today, it is not competitive because it doesn’t exist. Well, it exists at a trade show. And everyone knows how to do a trade-show demo.

If you look at the business of getting movies into the home, seven movies in a little while is not bad. That’s a good start. And that’s with a lot of people declaring they’re going to wait for this new system. My guess is, once they take a serious look at the market from a business perspective and say, ‘When do I start making money on these movies in the home?’ they’ll decide they can’t wait. If you introduce a 3D title now and you want to take it to market but you can’t really get enough homes for two years — well, in two years, does anybody remember that title?