3-d System Profits Lost To Australia
Sydney Morning Herald
Tuesday December 26, 1995
Unique Australian technology for creating three-dimensional film and television without headsets or goggles has been sold to a consortium of United States and European investors, with the potential loss to the country of billions of dollars in profits and royalties.
Insiders in Trutan - a joint venture of Arnott's Biscuits Ltd and entrepreneur Mr Donald Martin - claimed yesterday that a multi-million-dollar deal was signed last Friday and that the technology would be transferred overseas by next March.
The news follows the Federal Government's Innovation Statement, announced on December 6 by the Prime Minister, Mr Keating. A key objective of the statement was to help keep valuable Australian science and technology onshore.
A method of producing 3-D pictures that can be viewed without spectacles has long been the holy grail of electronics firms such as Sony, IBM and Bell Laboratories. Such a system could be used in a host of technologies, from computer-aided design and remote sensing to videophones, simulators, television and movies and military applications.
Mr Martin, who, with an electrical engineer, Mr Bjorn Olsson, invented the Trutan technology, said that existing 3-D systems, which require headsets, now generate about $3 billion annually worldwide. These are used primarily for industrial, automotive and aircraft design, but applications in areas such as medical diagnosis and treatment are growing rapidly.
With minor modifications, the Trutan technology could add "depth enhancement" to existing television and film images, Mr Martin said.
Once television stations and film studios were "pumping out proper 3-D signals", he said, the public could view true 3-D pictures - black and white or colour - on a specially designed television which would cost about $3,000. Professional 3-D systems would range from $20,000 to $1.5 million, Mr Martin estimated. He hoped the technology would be on the market late next year.
Mr Martin said that he had sought, unsuccessfully, to obtain Federal or State assistance to keep the technology in Australia. The Federal Minister for Science, Senator Cook, was not available for comment.
Existing 3-D systems exploit the fact that people see in three dimensions because the eyes have two slightly different views of the world. The brain combines the pictures from the left and right fields of vision to create a perception of depth.
Until now, researchers had assumed that to produce a realistic 3-D illusion, the brain had to receive images from both eyes simultaneously. So present systems employ either dual-screen headsets, such as those used in virtual reality simulators, or glasses containing differently coloured lenses.
But while working on a promotional simulator for Arnott's, Mr Martin and Mr Olsson discovered that the brain can construct 3D images when the left and right fields of vision are presented in rapid succession, much the way it "sees" objects behind a picket fence when travelling by in a moving vehicle.
The Trutan technology consists of a camera which takes pictures of two different fields of vision simultaneously. The signal is fed into a standard television through two channels where a computer splices the two perspectives into a single picture made up of narrow vertical strips. The strips show alternately the left and right fields of vision.
Finally, the computer animates the strips in combination with transparent strips, creating a picket fence effect that flickers so quickly it is not noticed by the viewer. The result: the brain sees a 3-D image wherever the eye falls on the screen.
© 1995 Sydney Morning Herald