 Why settle for just two dimensions? YAAAAAAAARGH! When you can have three! A decade ago, the marketing machine behind 3D TV was so strong that even we got caught up in the hype. But after all those years, not to mention the millions and millions of dollars spent promoting 3D as the next big thing, it seems like no one cares anymore. To the point where, if you blinked and missed the craze entirely, you might have never seen a 3D TV in person. Are you missing out? Did 3D TVs really deserve to die? Or were they simply left to slowly bleed out by an uncaring industry that's always chasing the next shiny box badge? To imagine what could have been, we tracked down two of the most notable 3D TVs to trial on our staff of highly trained guinea pigs. Was it cool? Or does the third D stand for disappointment? What's never disappointing is our sponsor. AMD! Are you overdue for a GPU upgrade? Well, it's a great time to purchase an AMD Radeon RX 6000 series GPU. And you can get the inside scoop on some great options from AMD and their partners at the link down below. In the late 2000s, 3D was picking up steam again as a cool new innovation. But it's actually really, really old tech. Way back in 1832, yes, 190 years ago, Sir Charles Wheatstone invented the stereoscope, which used a pair of mirrors angled towards images taken from two slightly different perspectives to create the illusion of depth. You might remember these, and you've almost certainly seen one of these. Well, both of them use the exact same principle. But it's a bit of a lonely experience in here, isn't it? When the motion picture was created, people were eager to try and blend the popular novelty of stereoscopes and view masters with movies resulting in anaglyphic 3D. These iconic red and cyan glasses have become the de facto symbol of 3D. But while they were super wowsers for black and white movies, they significantly degraded the experience of your newfangled Technicolor movies. Of course, we've come a long way since then. And thanks to light polarizing glass developed by Polaroid that allowed both convincing depth and full color, 3D films would surge back at least three more times. First in the 1950s Golden Age, again in the 80s, Jaws 3D, the third dimension is terror. And finally in the 2010s, spurred on by your favorite big blue aliens. No, not those ones. These ones. The difference, they said, was that this time you could bring the immersion home with you. Jake, get over here. Oh, yeah. I expected an action tumble over the couch, but that's pretty good. Oh, God. With no obvious downsides then, 3D was suddenly thrust back into nearly every form of entertainment that could fit a 3D. But how did they bring it to the home where previous attempts failed? To understand home 3D, we need to first understand commercial 3D, the most common of which is the Real D 3D found in theaters. It works by projecting the image through a polarizing lens that actually alters its polarization 144 times per second in step with 144 frames per second of film. Wait a second. 144 frames per second? I thought movies are at 24 FPS. Well, they are. But for starters, each of your eyes is going to need its own 24 frames per second. So there's 48 frames right there. And at that frame rate, flicker from the polarization lens is very noticeable. So to create a smoother experience, each frame actually gets shown three times for a shorter period. Each of your eyes gets covered by its own polarized lens, which filters out every other frame giving you that 3D experience. In the home, by contrast though, the two steps of polarizing the light and filtering it out were split resulting in two main categories of 3D technology, active and passive. Representing these two, we've got two displays that we're going to look at today. First of which is a Sony PlayStation 3D display. This is not to be confused with the PlayStation TV. This is our active 3D TV. It's 24 inches, 1080p and sports a 240 Hertz refresh rate. But that does not mean that it actually supports 240 FPS content. It was a whole advertising holdover from the plasma TV days. It should be noted that in 3D, it was only able to do 120 frames per second at 720p. Our second representing passive 3D is the LG Signature G6 OLED from 2016. This is one of the last and arguably the best 3D TVs made before all manufacturing of 3D TVs stopped later that year. It's 65 inches, 4K, it cost a whopping $8,000 and its HDR peak brightness is only 500 nits. So it only kind of supports HDR, kind of like YouTube only kind of supports HDR. Get subscribed by the way so you don't miss our upcoming video on that. Because it uses passive 3D, it comes with some huge advantages. Before we take a look at the king though, let's talk about the peasant. I'm just going to get all, I'm going to get all scooched back here. Oh my God. Move your hand. Does that not immediate? Oh, don't look at the lights. Use your other stick. I don't even know how to fire. Use your other stick. Oh God. Oh, the stick fires. This doesn't seem like a game where the 3D really does a whole lot. I mean, it's cool. What's better about passive versus active? Oh, we're going to talk about that boys. Actually, I guess now is as good a time as any to say that early on, pretty much all 3D TVs used a mostly normal LCD display, which helped reduce cost and complexity, but unfortunately relied on active 3D shutter glasses, which brought both cost and complexity back into the picture. Like the polarizing lenses built into the movie theater projector, these glasses are powered and their lenses contain a layer of crystals that can rotate when an electrical charge is sent through them. When those crystals rotate, they block the TV's image from one of your eyes. So if you sync this up with a high refresh rate display that alternates between the views that you're supposed to see, the left and right image, voila, the brain does its magic producing a 3D image. Oh, the script says before I try it, I got a gamer up with my WAN hoodie, but I guess we've already started trying it. So, haha. Healthatestore.com. Yeah, exactly right. When the game starts, it immediately makes me want to barf. Okay. Oh man, so you keep saying stuff that's like, wow, this is a perfect time to transition into the next scripted bit. Fine. Let's just do it. The issues with these passive displays and active shutter glasses are many. First up, the powered glasses need batteries, thus needing to be recharged. They can also suffer from wireless interference if you block the sync transmitter that's either on the display or as a separate piece of hardware. And many users complained about comfort and flicker, especially if there's any other light in the room. Oh, don't look at the lights. Finally, of course, they're expensive. Displays that relied on these kinds of glasses for their 3D effect would sometimes come with a pair or maybe two included in the box, but if you wanted any more than that, they would run you anywhere from $50 to over $150 each. Not that you were likely to need more glasses. The impressive library of about 60 3D games for the PlayStation 3 pales in comparison to its overall library and notably includes very few multiplayer titles. In a nutshell, PlayStation 3D had many of the same pros and cons as NVIDIA's 3D vision for PC gaming. High cost, limited game support, reduced image brightness, and LCD technology that simply wasn't fast enough to fully separate the stereo images, which led to a lot of brightness loss as well as frequent user headaches. Options. Oh, this is so cool. Yeah, should I try it now? A simple view. Here we go. Man, you lose so much brightness with these. They literally block half the light half the time. Look at the light and then lift the glasses up. One other issue is that devs weren't used to working in 3D, meaning that important information like the subtitles in Killzone, for example, would appear at a different depth than where you normally had to look. So you had to refocus your eyes to read them and then look back. So if you blinked, you could miss important information. Of course, the killer feature in my mind when I heard about the PlayStation 3D display wasn't necessarily stereoscopic gaming, but a simulview. Simulview promised to allow local multiplayer without splitting the screen. So each Jake and I could use half of the frames being output to see our own version of the game. Really? Cool, right? Yeah. I could see that being cool if you could like watch different content from your spouse when you're sitting on the same couch. OK, that's exactly the next talking point. One of the most things I was most excited for was like the kids are watching their kids movie with their headphones in. The wife and I are watching some serious movie, right? On the same TV. Yeah, that'd be pretty cool. Family time, right? Instead, you got to buy multiple TVs. Yeah, it's stupid. Are we playing at the same time right now? I think so. Oh my God, we are. Whoa. This is so cool, though. I never got to try it. I never had a PlayStation 3D display back in the day, and only a handful of games ever supported this. But I heard about this and I was like, wow, how amazing would that be, right? Like something like Mario Kart? Yeah. If you could just both have a full screen frickin' display, that'd be amazing. My head is pounding now. It's very obvious, right, that the polarization filter isn't perfect, and the pixels don't switch fast enough with LCD to completely get rid of the ghost of the other image. So it can be very unpleasant in the real world. Because of the hard to ignore downsides of active 3D glasses, this tech ended up pretty much completely abandoned. So then, how does the passive alternative fare? To find out, we're going to have to jump ahead a few years and a few price brackets to the LG Signature OLED G6. Holy s***, if I just close my right eye and Jake closes his left, here we go, boys. It still works. The first advantage of passive 3D TVs is that they can be more easily enjoyed with the whole family, thanks to much cheaper glasses. How cheap, you might ask? Well, free, if you're willing to be creative. This is a pair that Taron actually liberated from the movie theater, and they work just fine. We're supposed to try it with a Blu-ray first, but Jake already got ahead of ourselves a little bit and tried just closing one eye to see half of our Killzone game. And it's like, how well does this compare to shutters? Yeah, way better. The brightness is crazy, but I can screen peek so easy. Well, it's co-op, so. We can show the camera this, though. Oh, Linus, this looks so cool. I know it does. Here's the thing, Jake, I was a 3D nerd, but... Really? Yeah, the problem is that the active shutter glasses gave me just a splitting headache. Like, I wanted to love it. I agree. And the passive stuff, well, it never really got good until the moment 3D died. This came out, like, in the... The body of 3D was twitching, and this TV was its last spasm. And it finally got, not good, but great. Okay, here we go. You ready? This doesn't look that 3D to me. Um, I can't tell. I mean, it does kind of look 3D. There's definitely stuff popping out, but I don't think that I would call this a very satisfying experience. Well, we have Blu-rays. Yeah, but I really wanted to see something that I think is actually gonna look good, and Titanic definitely won't. Independence Day resurgence. I mean, I don't think that even looks good in 2D. Hey, roasted. Can we put them on a USB stick and just plug it into the TV? Oh, my God, maybe. That's a thing. That might be a thing, Jake. We gave up on trying to play 3D files. We are on our Titanic Blu-ray with our Panasonic fancy Blu-ray player. And we're ready now, right? Yeah. Hit it. Well, wait, is it my controller? Yeah, press 3D. Oh, wow. I don't know if this is the movie I would go watch in 3D. Like, oh, wow, the people are coming. They pop out of the corner. Yeah, this pen's coming right out. Wow. This guy's really in front. Very 3D. Like obnoxiously 3D. And the brightness difference is marginal. We've got some better stuff coming in terms of the actual 3D-ness of the content. But in terms of how the TV performs, like, good gravy, isn't that amazing? Passive TVs are able to achieve this level of brightness. And, I mean, it doesn't give you a headache. No, I don't have a headache. I mean, I do have a headache still from yesterday, but that's the same headache. The way that they do this is that each alternate line vertically is actually polarized the opposite way coming right out of the TV. And you can actually see it if you take a pair of glasses and you hold it right up to your content. Now, on a regular 1080p display, that would be a bit of a problem because you'd be giving up half of your vertical resolution for a 1080p 3D movie. But because this one is 4K, there's actually some trickery in the TV itself. So we are getting the full 1080p images interlaced because we have double the resolution. That's part of what makes this TV... What do they call it? You said like frame-smushing or something like that? What, interlacing? No, no, no. It works kind of like an interlaced video frame, except that instead of having just one frame with half of it being shown alternately, we've actually got two full frames, one for each eye, utilizing that full vertical resolution. Come try it, David. This is an absolutely incredible 3D experience, though. Well, why don't we try a movie that might actually use 3D better? Yeah, Ocean Predators. Oh, there we go. Oh, wow. That looks awful. Wow, if you move around, it looks so weird. I'm actually kind of surprised at how well it works from different viewing angles. I want to... let's do an animated one. You figured out a way to play one of the animated ones, right? Oh, I figured out how to play Doom. I want to watch Avatar. I want to watch something that's not going to be s***. Boss Baby? Hi there. This is a bit of a long shot. Do you guys have any 3D Blu-rays in stock? You have a huge selection. Of course you do. Found it in the clearance section. It's very popular, 3D Blu-ray. I think I got some animated stuff in here. Whoa, Toy Story? Yeah, that'd be cool. Oh, this is not 3D. Oh, 3D version included. Okay, well, let's pick up some good stuff then. Okay, so I got... Shazam. Crowdy with a Chance of Meatballs. We got some Finding Nemo. Oh, Finding Nemo. Yeah. $14. Okay, I'm actually excited about this. Shrek, that's what it takes. We all saw that I'm buying these for work purposes, so I'm using the work card. And they're staying at work. It's business. Are you ready? I'm ready. You ready to get Shrek-ed? Okay. Wow, this is actually... This is awesome. Wow, though the 3D is done pretty well. This is the first one so far that I've been like, this actually kind of adds something. The thing is, when you've got a two-camera rig and you're trying to shoot live action in 3D, focus is a nightmare, right? Because you can only have one part of the scene in focus. And when you're watching it back then, if you look and focus your eyes at a closer or farther away object, it's out of focus, so you're focused on a blurry object. It just doesn't work. There's still some weirdness. Like when somebody runs into the frame, it's kind of like jittery. Yes. Man, now I want a 3D projector for the theater room. God damn it. Man, this is like a video game. There's like propaganda before it too. Ooh, here we go. Interesting. They didn't try to overdo the 3D in this movie. Yeah, like in that scene, it was just the fireworks really. I feel like because everything is so dark though, you don't really... It kind of masks the 3D-ness. Like in the other content, you notice it a lot more when there's big color changes between what's in the foreground and what's in the background. Okay. That where Buddy was like below the playing field was pretty cool. This is pretty cool. Switch it to 2D for a second. I want to see what the difference is like. Sure. Oh, yeah, that's immediately way more lame. At some point, it should be noted that even with a 4K display, depending on the 3D content, you could still be limited to a vertical resolution of 540 lines. Why? It often came down to bandwidth limitations at the time. While Blu-rays could simply double the frame rate and or resolution, that would have added enough cost for broadcasters that any push for home 3D would have been dead on arrival. So most 3D is actually handled by sending two images at half resolution and then broadcasting them together in a single 1920 by 1080 frame. The two main ways they do this are side by side or top bottom, where you either lose half of the horizontal resolution or half of the vertical resolution respectively. The image gets sent to the TV where they are then merged and displayed as a single 1080p frame. 1080p-ish. It's kind of like when you're interlacing a 2D image, but instead of interlacing data from a single frame, it's actually from two separate frames that are destined to go to each of your eye holes. Truthfully, on a quality display like this one, it still looks pretty good. So why didn't 3D stick around this time? 3D was and continues to be more difficult to produce and really easy to mess up. So even with that additional cost, it would often end up looking cheap. Adding insult to injury, the content was expensive to distribute, less comfortable for audiences. You can say that again. And all of this at a higher price. Glasses-less 3D displays like on the Nintendo 3DS addressed some of these problems. Games and animated films use virtual rather than physical cameras and are therefore much easier to convert to 3D. But as 3DS users can attest, they have their own drawbacks, including crummy resolution and even crummier viewing angles. With all these problems in mind, it's no surprise that by 2016, just six years after being thrust into the mainstream, production of 3D TVs by all major brands ceased. 4K Blu-ray doesn't support 3D at all, nor do any modern consoles. And as far as we know, there are no 3D TV channels still available, making it effectively dead. There are still niche pockets of 3D enthusiasts, though. To my knowledge, Nvidia's final 3D vision-capable driver can still play old stereo 3D games, and the latest is from, I think, 2020. Voodoo apparently still supports 3D. And these current model projectors from JVC still include robust 3D support for the handful of 3D Blu-rays that are still being produced. But due to the complexity of shooting live-action films in 3D, many of them have 3D implemented in a way that's just kind of cheap and gimmicky looking because it's added in post. So I... it's in the script. I doubt they sell very well, but we know that for a fact based on having actually gone to the store. I don't know, maybe the new Avatar is gonna kickstart another 3D renaissance? I don't know. They have a kid now, and there's water. Seems compelling enough to spend 13 years of your life working on, right? Well, maybe we can buy another $8,000 TV. Right! Or maybe you could be compelled to spend some money on our sponsor. Jackery. 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