TVs of the Future: Behind the Scenes at Samsung, Episode 3: Passive 3D

In the third part of our interview with Simon Dongbae Lee, the Principal Engineer at Samsung's Korean R and D lab, he told us about their plans to get rid of active 3D TVs and move over to passive systems in the future.


Simon started by asking us what we thought would make 3D TVs better in the future, and we replied by saying that we thought active TVs would make way for Quad HD passive devices.

He found that rather funny, and explained that active technology had never been his personal favourite, and, that for him, in an ideal world, we would have skipped a generation and avoided heavy glasses, lots of wasted energy, problems with synchronisation and visual fatigue.

Step 1: Stepping up the Frequency

It's this last problem that will be dealt with first.  If you try watching 3D in broad daylight with the curtains open, or under bright lights, you'll end up blinking within a few seconds.  Some lucky people are completely immune to this sensation of bright light flashing in front of your eyes, while others can see it even in a dark room.

According to Simon, that's entirely normal.  The current generation of active 3D glasses have two LCD screens that alternate at a rate of 60 Hz, but switching between blacking out one eye and being clear 60 times a second just isn't fast enough.

So the next generation of 3D TVs (which we're not expecting until next year) will have two clear advantages: a better algorithm for converting 2D to 3D and glasses that swap between eyes more quickly.  We imagine they'll move up to 120 Hz.

Step 2: From Active to Passive—without losing resolution

But for Samsung, the best solution would be for everybody to use the technology currently employed in cinemas.  The filters used in the passive glasses you get when you go to the movies are very different to those that come with the handful of passive 3D TVs currently available.

With these TVs, the filters are perpendicular: one is polarised vertically and the other vertically.  That means that the frames seen by each eye are only at half resolution and it's hard to get excited about a resolution like that when the manufacturers have spent years pushing Full HD ...

Simon explained that, at the cinema, the filters are circular instead, which allows full resolution frames to be seen by each eye.  That gives cinemas plenty of advantages: the glasses they use are lighter, are cheaper to produce, don't need recharging and are much more durable.

The ideal solution would be to make TVs the same way, but the problem is that manufacturing them would be prohibitively expensive.  The entire process of panel manufacture will need to be redesigned to create hardware that's compatible with glasses with these new filters.  Samsung's lab already has a few prototypes, but they've found two big problems:

• this new system works perfectly in 3D, but in 2D, lots of detail is lost and the colours are less accurate and even.
• the extra costs associated with these new passive displays will be even higher than the current generation of active 3D screens.

'Now, whether or not they'll be available in 5, 10, 15 or 20 years is something I just don't know' admitted Simon. 

To be continued ...

> TVs of the Future: Behind the Scenes at Samsung, Episode 2: Formats


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