The way I understand it, there are 4 ways to beam separate images into your eyes.
- Goggles. Each eye gets its own mini TV set, with what’s essentially a microscope to make a screen 1 inch big an 2 inches away appear like a 42 inch screen 10 feet away.
- Lenticular Display, in which one monitor shoots 2 different images in 2 different directions. If a TV has about 2000 vertical lines, then there’ll be 1000 little triangular prisms that each cover 2 lines. One line goes to your left eye, the other to your right. You’ll remember this from “3D” or “animated” stickers you got as a kid.
- Active Shutters. A display will alternate between showing the left image, then the right image. When showing the left image, the shutter on your right eye will go black. When showing the right image, vice versa. This happens fast enough that your eye doesn’t notice. This is fairly easy for current TV technology to handle, so the cost isn’t that much – pretty soon it’ll be about zero.
- Polarization. The left image is showing in one polarization, the right image in an opposing polarization. A polarized lens over your left eye allows only the left image in, and ditto for the right. This technology uses simple optics in the eyewear, unlike the shutter technology, so the glasses are cheaper (cheap enough to be disposable at a movie theater). But the TV display technology is much much more expensive – about $2,000 more (at retail).
According to this article in U.S. News & World Report, the Asia market is leaning towards the more expensive but higher quality polarization technology, whereas the U.S. market is going towards the cheaper active shutter technology.
