Three dimensional TV, or 3D TV as it will undoubtedly come to be called, is sure to become a winner when it comes to market in the future. This futuristic way of watching TV has been envisioned for years. In fact, it’s a rare science fiction scenario that doesn’t anticipate some kind of holographic or three dimensional entertainment or communications technology.
3D TV has a lot of practical uses for a lot of different people both professionally and personally. For example, the applications to diagnostic medicine are pretty obvious. After all, a two dimensional X-ray could never compare to viewing a scan of someone’s innards from any angle when it comes to figuring out what’s wrong with them. Three-D scans could take the guess work out of a variety of different types of surgery by allowing doctors to look at wounds, tumors, foreign objects, broken bones, and blockages before even opening a patient up. Plus, when combined with real time scanning technology that’s already available, 3D TV could even allow doctors to look at the physical processes of living people in real time!
The applications for physicists, scientists, and engineers could also be extremely useful. Much like doctors could do with humans, zoologists could look at the inner workings of exotic, even possibly endangered animals, without dissection. Physicists will be able to use the technology to analyze complex processes that would be extremely difficult to conceptualize in two dimensions. Engineers will be able to do similar things with the technology in order to visualize the things that they’re building and designing. If you think about the extremely small applications of nanotechnology, you can see how 3D TV could be extremely useful for the development of that technology as well. After all, with most other mediums people can look at their prototypes.
One of the first forms of entertainment that will benefit from 3D TV will be video gaming. That’s because most modern video games generate their images in 3D and then convert them to two dimensions for display on a computer screen or a TV screen. This means that it would take only minor changes to how video games work in order to display a huge number of them in 3D.
Creating TV programming in three dimensions is a little more difficult, but several well known directors are working on 3D movies right now. There’s also software under development that converts 2D video into 3D images that can be shown on prototypes of 3D TV sets. The software still has a lot of bugs that need to be worked out. While it does convert 2D programming to 3D programming, it doesn’t render the images very realistically. At least one version of the software that’s been developed so far is that it can be run on hardware that’s widely available. In fact, a laptop computer was able to run prototype software without any trouble.
While we can’t be completely sure how 3D TV will play out- especially when it comes to compatibility and creating programming for it- we can be sure that it is coming, and by all accounts it should be coming in the near future.
