Stereoscopic motion pictures were present at the very dawn of cinema. In fact, 3-D movie peep shows preceded the actual invention of motion pictures. In 1838 Sir Charles Wheatstone made the obvious yet startling discovery of binocular stereoscopy when he realized that we see the world in 3-D because we have two eyes which see the world from two slightly different viewpoints. Wheatstone made stereo drawings and built a mirror device called the stereoscope to demonstrate his discovery. The stereoscope separated the left and right eye images and channeled them to the appropriate eye. This two-eyed viewing principle, binocular stereopsis, in which the left eye sees the left eye image and the right eye sees the right, underlies all 3-D motion pictures.
By 1870, Wheatstone had created a sequential viewing device for stereo photography which captured motion. When William Kennedy Lauren Dickson developed the kinetograph camera for Thomas Edison in 1891, stereoscopic motion pictures were on his mind. "It is Mr. Edison's intention to give a stereoscopic effect to the pictures taken in connection with the Kinetograph," wrote Dickson in a letter of 1891, "and a long extensive series of experiments have been conducted at the Laboratory, very good results being obtained." The first projected 3-D movies in America, were screened on June 10, 1915 at the Astor Theater in New York City. Edwin S. Porter, famous director of The Great Train Robbery (1903), working with William E. Waddell, had photographed stereoscopic motion pictures using a twin-film camera system. These 3-D films, Rural America, Niagara Falls and a segment from Jim the Penman, a feature film, were projected using anaglyphic (red/blue) filters with the audience wearing similarly colored 3-D viewing glasses. The anaglyph process uses complementary colors of red and blue or red and green to create the left and right eye image selection necessary for 3-D viewing. In the 1920s there were a number of stereoscopic motion pictures given public presentations in a variety of formats that included anaglyph and an alternating frame shutter system called "Teleview" developed by Laurens Hammond in which the left and right images rapidly alternated on screen. These alternating images were synchronized with the 3-D revolving shutter viewing glasses through which the spectator looked at the left and right eye images alternately. The anaglyph, however, was used in 1922 to exhibit the first 3-D feature film, The Power of Love, which had been photographed with a twin camera unit developed by Harry K. Fairall and Robert F. Elder. Educational Pictures also released in 1922 a number of anaglyphic short films they called "Plastigrams" that were made by Jacob F. Leventhal and Frederic E. Ives with a dual camera unit. In 1935 Edwin Land developed polarizing filters which made the projection of color 3-D films possible. Projecting left and right eye movies through crossed-polarization filters onto a silver screen meant that the audience had to wear polarizing glasses which matched the cross-polarization of the projectors. Stereoscopic cinematographer and camera technician John Norling produced a twin strip 12-minute documentary Motor Rhythm in 1939 which was made for Chrysler's "In Tune With Tomorrow" exhibit at the New York World's Fair. This stop-motion animated film was exhibited using two interlocked projectors and polarizing filters. Norling subsequently remade Motor Rhythm in color and retitled it New Dimensions.. For the 1951 Festival of Britain and a unique 3-D movie theater on the South Bank of the Thames River called the Telekinema, Raymond and Nigel Spottiswoode, along with Leslie P. Dudley, produced several twin-strip stereoscopic motion pictures. This festival marks the end of a long novelty period for the stereoscopic motion picture which may be said to have lasted from Wheatstone's discovery of stereography in 1838 up to 1952 when the 3-D movie "boom" in Hollywood occurred. The 1950s 3-D movie boom , which started on November 26, 1952 with the premiere of Arch Oboler's African adventure film Bwana Devil, marks the 2nd period for stereoscopic motion pictures, the "Era of Convergence," with twin-camera production of 3-D films and twin-projector exhibition. From 1952 to 1954 over 50 3-D movies were released in the dual-band format. By the early 1950s, viable single-strip 3-D camera processes by Felix Bodrossy in Hungary and Robert Bernier in the United States were in development, simplifying stereoscopic motion picture photography. Using Bernier's single-strip Spacevision process, Arch Oboler produced The Bubble, which was released in 1966. Single-strip 3-D photography and projection drove a second boom of stereoscopic movies in 1982-83. The end of 3-D film's 2nd period and the beginning of the "Age of Immersion," stereo cinema's 3rd era, is marked by the release in 1986 of the film Transitions, produced by Colin Low, in the twin strip 15/70mm IMAX 3-D format. With 15/70mm film, each frame of horizontally-travelling 70mm film is 15 perforations wide, about 9 times the size of a convention 35mm frame. The 15/70 3-D films are photographed and projected in a dual-band configuration. The age of "Digital 3-D Cinema," the 4th era of 3-D movies, began November 4, 2005 when Disney's Chicken Little 3-D was released on 84 silver stereoscopic screens using the new Real D technology, Lenny Lipton's "Z-screen" and a single DLP projector. Audiences viewed Chicken Little in 3-D using circular polarizing glasses. By October 2008, over 1000 digital 3-D theater screens have been put in place. Digital technology is now fueling a renaissance of stereography at every level from the worldwide Internet to the motion picture screen and 3-D TV in the home. Independent 3-D movie production is about to explode with the convergence of desktop 3-D and theatrical motion pictures. New tools for stereoscopic production and post-production are becoming increasingly accessible to filmmakers and this will lead to unprecedented levels of 3-D content for stereo cinema.
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