When will 3D viewing glasses be obsolete?

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>> I should have revised this 3D description of this panel, which I wrote right after I saw Jeffrey Katzenberg at a fortune conference, that was highly ballyhooed and featured in newspapers all over the world in which he said and he actually said this in only slightly less enthusiastic terms at a 3D conference that was held in September that and his view 3D television is for all intents and purposes the successor for HD. It is going to be standard with glasses within a year or two and he sees classes as only a transitional technology, which will have us watching 3D television unaided, I believe he said a few years after that. so if you add two plus two, it sounds like he is saying four or five years from now, we are going to be watching television unaided and he added to that the fact that he sees 3D extending itself very quickly to all types of devices, including cell phones that project 3D images on walls. We actually have an example of 2D images here of being exhibited on walls, but he sees 3D and that he sees as the entire next generation of anything that is worthwhile in content production in Hollywood. So I thought I would throw that enthusiastic assessment at the panel and see what you think about it.

>> Well, I wish we could hire Jeffrey as our EVP of sales at Real D. He is a great evangelist for the technology certainly and I think Real D would broadly agree with his vision, being down on the nuts and bolts of the technology, maybe the time frame is a little aggressive, but I say consumers by and large haven't come around to the vision that 3D is the future. I think we are around 20 percent or so are starting to think that way and the other 80 percent are still learning about it, but when you get into say for example, the consumer electronics industry, there is a pretty broad consensus that it is even potentially more transformative than HD, which might seem a little surprising at first, but reality is you look at a DVD signal versus an HD signal and it is nicer right. You look at a 3D signal on a TV versus an HD signal, it blows you out of your chair. It is fantastic. It is like watching, you know, it is like experiencing a movie by watching it happen through a window, as opposed to just seeing it in 2D. It really looks great and it is a big deal, so how long does all this take to really build and install base, because you do need to replace your TV to get that kind of experience, it will take awhile. One key point to bring up is it doesn't really at cost to the TV to add this feature, if you do it in active eyewear methodology. So you have to buy kind of expensive eye ware, but it doesn't actually add much costs to the TV, so his notion that it will be standard in TVs is really not that far out there. So maybe add a couple bucks costs to the TV, so what you will have is not necessarily people going into the store to buy a 3D TV, because they need 3D, but when they buy a new TV, it is going to support 3D and as that install base grows, you will see TV networks supporting it and the studios supporting it with their windowing and it will take a hold and it will be a big day in about, I would say in about four or five years from now, it will be very, very common.

>> So I will talk about the glasses free vision, it is great. It is the Holy Grail. We would all like to see it, the problem is there is just some fundamental physics that you have to get around that when you take that view and you try to make it in multiple angles, you have to divide up the pixels. At least with the way we see the technology today and there is no practical way around that, maybe many of you have seen it. If you are in a small environment, a personal environment, there are actually some cell phones that have 3D displays, so you can kind of modulate the left and right eye view that kind of works, but in a family viewing situation, I think it is going to be awhile and if we are going to go that far, I would rather see the Holideck from Star Trek, just make it so number one, because that would really be an immersive experience, but I think as was mentioned one of the technical issues having the higher frame rate display, so you can display the left and right eye, the technology is there today. Many of you are buying HD sets, you know, 120 hertz, 240 hertz refresh rate with all the display technologies out there today, so it is a relatively simple matter to do the alternating frame sequential approach, which is why the glasses are the quick way to the market, so and with the Blue Ray standards being just about done, it looks like there will be lots of initial content. Many of us are expecting Avatar to be kind of the tipping point for kind of going mainstream with 3D in the cinema, it is already there, but I think Avatar will kind of begin the push more with the Hollywood folks over into seeing 3D into being a real business and so far the box office receipts for 3D, you know, they are making money and money talks in Hollywood at the end of the day, not technology.

>> Three percent of the films that were produced this year were 3D, delivering 10 percent of the box office, so it is a pretty stunning figure and I think this is really about modernization and certainly to someone like Jeff Katzenberg, who runs a company called DreamWorks Animation, he is way out in front with 3D, as most of the animators are, because animation is modeled in 3D and CGI and it becomes very easy to render it in 3D, just by rendering an extra eye. So you can control all your elements in 3D in animation. The real issue is going to be content going down the road, because it is not just animation that is going to be a driver here. Ultimately, if you are going to make a decision to change out your television set and buy something for your family or for your home are you really going to buy Monsters and Aliens and Up and all the animation that has been done. Is that going to drive you to go out and change your whole system? I think the issue is going to be really driven forward, as Patrick was saying through Avatar, which has live action elements in it, but I can tell you in having experience in shooting this stuff, the technology is way out in front with what the learning curve is in terms of delivering 3D and I think really for this to catch on, it is here to stay for sure, but it is an option. 2D is not going away, 3D will be an add on. You will see certain product made in 3D, but there is a huge amount of interest in this in terms of producing shows, but there really isn't a huge amount of personnel who are capable of doing it, so there is going to be a ramp up in terms of being able to deliver the kind of content that really makes 3D work outside of computer animation and certainly gaming is going to lead the way with this.

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