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Originally published on 05/23/2002
When I asked Elliot Klein, the CEO of TDV Technologies, who his company competes with, he said of his market, "Everybody's run away." No surprise: his market is consumer 3D viewing glasses.
Fast Facts:
TDV Technologies
www.3dworld.com |
| CEO |
Elliot Klein. Last job: President of AOL's PicturePlace division
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| HQ |
New York, NY
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| Employees |
22
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| Market |
3D hardware, software, content
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| Funding |
$10M+, all private (no VC)
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| Profitable? |
Projected this year
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TDV makes battery-powered, cordless black specs that use separate LCD shutters to control what each eye sees (a small infrared transmitter connects to the display being watched and controls the glasses). These 3D images can be displayed on regular televisions as well as computer screens, but not on LCD monitors -- an important limitation, I believe.
To point out the large potential market for his company's glasses, Elliot told me that many PC games running on nVidia graphics cards are automatically 3D-enabled. He also says that he's talking with movie studios to convert some of their DVDs to 3D, and that his company has software that can convert streaming or live video to 3D on the fly, which works well for sports. Core to the company is its online portal for 3D content that can be viewed with the glasses.
The technology TDV uses is better than polarized lenses or color keying (the familiar red-and-blue anaglyph format), and cheaper than putting displays directly in front of each eye. But while 3D imaging has great application to education and science, and always has, I just can't envision this product taking off for the general public. Maybe it's that synthetic 3D images are disconcerting (because the image doesn't change as you move your real head), or that most people don't want to wear special glasses to watch TV or play computer games. But more importantly, there's a good reason few companies are tackling 3D today, despite the onward march of technology: in more than one hundred years, not a single 3D moving picture technology has become more than a novelty. Can a better pair of glasses reverse this trend?
- Rafe Needleman
email: rafe-needleman@catchoday.com
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