THE SILVER SCREEN: Part 2

Silver screens, if they are well made and installed, can have minimal hot-spotting, but they still have what I call shading.  I make a distinction between hot-spotting and shading.  Although they may come about from the same reflective characteristics of the screen, shading has to do with an asymmetrical change in brightness across the screen and is typically dependent upon where you are sitting.  Shading happens quite noticeably when sitting in the worst seat in the house, say in the front row way on the extreme left or the right. In fact, the worst seats in the house for viewing a 2-D movie on a matte screen become even worse when viewing a polarized light stereoscopic movie on a silver screen from a bad seat. 

THE SILVER SCREEN: Part 1

Ah the silver screen: searchlights scanning the Hollywood sky, glamorous premiers, gorgeous actresses….  The silver screen is a term that has denoted the glamour and excitement of Hollywood since Chaplin twirled his cane. While to some it is the most visible sign of hope for the cinema for others it is a dreaded surface upon which to project those old standby 2D movies.  But there’s so much more to it than glamour – there’s dreadful science.  It’s a technology that ought to command the industry’s keenest minds, because, after all, that’s where a hundred and fifty million bucks wind up as a vibrating veneer of a hundred billion photons reflected into the eyes of tens of millions of photon consumers. That’s one big point in favor of the film industry – they have not dehumanized the customer to the point where he or she is called a consumer.  The customers are still the audience, people with feelings rather than human maws born to consume piles of chazarai labeled made in Chinese. 

Reality and Illusion

To paraphrase Einstein:  Space is what keeps everything from happening at the same place, and stereoscopic imaging helps us visualize space.  The concept of space, or distance, is so fundamental, that a tentative understanding of our perception of it has taken the human race centuries. Stereoscopic imaging heightens our perception of space and it is so fundamental to our existence that any idea that the stereoscopic cinema is a passing fad is ridiculous.

Glossary

In any discipline, nomenclature turns out to be of obvious importance.  It’s crucial for all the people who are doing the thing to agree on the same set of definitions.  Without that, it’s impossible to communicate – or it’s impossible to communicate without ambiguity. 

Stereoscopic Composition

The 3-D or stereoscopic cinema is an extension of the quest for three-dimensionality.  Creating three-dimensional images has always been a part of the cinema, and its creative people have tried to control and exploit it to tell the story.  The current interest in the stereoscopic cinema is not a radical departure from what has come before; the stereoscopic depth cue is one of many, but is the only cue that requires two eyes to perceive.

A Step Towards the Classification of 3-D Displays

A recent article in a prestigious journal has inspired this blog. In it was included a foldout chart classifying stereoscopic moving image systems. The chart was obscure and confusing. I prefer to have people understand stereoscopic imaging, and the chart is of no help. It isn’t as if the classification of stereoscopic imaging systems is at the same level of complexity as that of the Periodic Table. But classifying a technology family, a system created by the human mind, can also be a challenging.

My SPIE Publications

A number of my papers have been published by the Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE) over the years.

Physics World Interview

I was interviewed in the July, 2007 issue of Physics World.  This is a publication of the Institute of Physics, which features an interview with a notable physicist each month.