Third Dimension

I was reading interview of IMAX corporation CEO about his business challenges. IMAX made a business by 'thinking big'. With advent of malls and multiplexes, Cinemas are continuing to become smaller for want of profitability in business. In 70's, defying the gravity of smaller cinema mentality, IMAX stood tall, promised tall and delivered it and continue to deliver! Their business model revolves around giving a different immersing movie experience to viewers that can't be provided by regular cinemas and TVs. He was contemplating about 3-d cinemas as the next big paradigm shift in movie world, after the shift to color movies from monochrome.  What do you think?

On a sidekick, a little gyan on how 3-D cinemas works! Each eye sees an object with an angle shift because of inter-ocular distance. Brain maps these two images and gives the 3-D perspective. 3-D cinemas are based on this. While shooting, two lens are kept at inter-ocular distance and two views are recorded separately on two films.  Next step is to project both images in one screen for the viewers, and each projection has to be made available exclusive for separate eyes. The simple solution is to use polarization. Red and green polarized images projected on the screen. Viewers has to use special glasses which can receive red light in one eye and green light in other eye. Thus two images are made available to brain. And brain goes ahead maps them and gives the 3-D perception to viewers. Vola!

3-D movies aren't yet catching up because of increase in production costs and unavailability of infrastructure in all cinemas! There is an interesting business prospect in this problem! If we can have a technological solution to convert 2-D movies to 3-D movies as post-production process, then we are cracking the first problem - increase in production costs.  Can do a little SWOT analysis on this technical risk.

S - It is feasible, technically. Add a new projection to existing 2-D image hasn't been proven yet. But feasible!

W- It is a R&D problem. Initial solution may not be of high quality. Academia work on this is unknown! I had a seen one interesting link in Carnegie Mellon University site about software that can do 3-D photo Popup image of a given 2-D image. Try it out

O - Market for a simple digital device that does conversion in production end

T- Work on breaking infrastructure problem has to go hand-in-hand!

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