Stereoscopic Cinema

Stereoscopic cinema has seen a surge of activity in recent years, and for the first time all of the major Hollywood studios released 3-D movies in 2009. This is happening alongside the adoption of 3-D technology for sports broadcasting, and the arrival of 3-D TVs for the home. Two previous attempts to introduce 3-D cinema in the 1950s and the 1980s failed because the contemporary technology was immature and resulted in viewer discomfort. But current technologies – such as accurately-adjustable 3-D camera rigs with onboard computers to automatically inform a camera operator of inappropriate stereoscopic shots, digital processing for post-shooting rectification of the 3-D imagery, digital projectors for accurate positioning of the two stereo projections on the cinema screen, and polarized silver screens to reduce cross-talk between the viewers leftand right-eyes – mean that the viewer experience is at a much higher level of quality than in the past. Even so, creation of stereoscopic cinema is an open, active research area, and there are many challenges from acquisition to post-production to automatic adaptation for different-sized display. This chapter describes the current state-of-the-art in stereoscopic cinema, and directions of future work. Frédéric Devernay INRIA Grenoble Rhône-Alpes, France e-mail: [email protected] Paul Beardsley Disney Research, Zürich, e-mail: [email protected] ∗ This was published as chapter 2 in Rémi Ronfard and Gabriel Taubin, editors, Image and Geometry Processing for 3-D Cinematography, volume 5 of Geometry and Computing, pages 1151. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2010. ISBN 978-3-642-12392-4. doi: 10.1007/978-3-642-12392-4 2. The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com.