Notwithstanding the recent news of the BluRay Disc Association backing of a single, active-shutter-based spec for 3D content distribution on BD media, the fact is, the industry is still gyrating with multiple standards for distribution and display. And proponents of some technologies - including anaglyph - haven’t lost steam endorsing their own solutions.

Earlier this month, at 3D Entertainment Summit held in Hollywood, technology startup Trioscopics demonstrated its anaglyph-based (magenta-green) 3D system for theater and home use. The company claims that its system, which uses "proprietary encoding," far surpasses the effect achieved with the standard red/cyan anaglyph system. As is standard with the anaglyph process, the greatest advantage of such a system is that it is compatible with current digital cinema and home entertainment systems, making stereoscopic viewing possible on existing standard playback displays and devices.

Trioscopics has partnered with American Paper Optics to produce the glasses, which apparently has exclusivity on the production of the specially-needed color combination. Recently, American landed a 17-million piece order with toy and game giant Mattel for a Barbie 3D DVD out for U.S. release this month, with worldwide distribution later in the year. Earlier versions of TrioScopics’ 3D technology were used in the DVD and Blu-ray releases of Journey to the Center of the Earth, My Bloody Valentine, and Coraline, for which some 50 million pairs of anaglyph glasses were delivered

"Our 3-D technology has improved with each subsequent release, and is now poised to provide a state-of-the-art, immersive entertainment experience to audiences worldwide," said TrioScopics founder John D. Lowry. He makes the point that, with approximately 6,000 digital cinema installations in North America, "over half are not equipped for 3-D projection."

Lowry has developed imaging technology solutions for the motion picture and television industries for 57 years, and holds numerous patents on image-processing. He was one of the pioneers in digital video, doing system design of digital video processors when the technology was in its infancy. In addition to his work with TrioScopics, Lowry founded Lowry Digital, whose proprietary image processing has been used to post-process current motion pictures, as well as to restore hundreds of cinema classics, including Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and 20 films in the James Bond library. Most recently, his technology was used to restore video images from the Apollo 11 moonwalk for NASA.

Lowry’s background in image processing lends some weight to his assertions of image quality - but don’t ignore the power of profit. Magenta-green is probably better at brightness matching than red-green, but ghosting would still appear to be a problem, at least from anecdotal information, but could improve with time. And while there is much to be said about compatibility with existing equipment, many film producers - and consumers - still consider it an "old" technology, and that could be its biggest hurdle. -agc