We're going to talk about 3d movies and how do 3d movies and glasses

work, what's the technology behind these things.

So how does it work? Well the first question to ask is why do we have
depth perception?
How do we in the real world we get some sense of Lars is so far away from
me I can sort of see that he's a solid object rather than a plane. Where do
we get that from?
The key thing is we've got two eyes that are separated bya a certain
distance so both of these eyes see a slightly different scene and your brain
is unbelievably clever at taking those different scenes and bringing them
together and giving you that depth perception.
So then how do you get something that's flat on a screen in a cinema or on
a television and give you that depth perception?
Well again what you need to do is to be playing different scenes to
different eyes that's the key thing and what you do is you have two
cameras when you're filming the the movie, one camera is filming what
goes to the left eye one camera is filming what goes to the right eye and
you bring those together and you have a slight offset which is why when
you take your glasses off everything looks quite blurred on the screen.
So the challenge at the cinema is well how do you take something on a flat
screen and how do you deliver those two separate scenes each to one eye.
How do you get that how do you trick the brain into thinking that scene
has got real depth how do we do that?
Well it used to be, you may remember Lars and Robert that in the eighties
you used to have red and blue glasses Youd have these tinted things and
what they do is they basically have red and blue filters and you take the
the the film that one camera shot and they take the film the other camera
and shot one of which has a blue tint the other which is a red tint and then
you use blue and red and filters to separate those out so the one that's got
the red tint will come to though the red eye that whereas the blue tinted
one will go to the blue eye
but yeah we've moved on and the problem with red and blue
approach is that you're playing with the colors and you lose color definition
they look washed out the depth perception isn't as good actually with with
the with the colors and it's very problematic in terms of getting a nice high
definition movie so what do we do now well actually what we do is we play
with something called the polarization of light

You've come across polarization you come across Polaroid before and
polaroid is basically a thin film I got some of it here in that thin film are lots
and lots of polymer molecules long-chain molecules that are stretched in a

particular direction and so I'm sure you've seen this before you take two
pieces of polaroid film you match them up like that you can roughly see
through it I guess and then when you turn it together turn it turn it round
to degrees it blocks the light why does it do that ok its going to be tricky
to explain at a non-scientific level but lights a wave let's start with that,
other times it behaves like particles but for the purposes of this we're
going to take that light as a wave.
But what is it a wave off? well it's what it is is an electromagnetic wave it's
an electric field and magnetic field we're going to concentrate here only in
the electric field that's all really that matters right now.
This thing light propagating like that in that direction now it's got we call it
an electric field vector and what that basically is is tells us which direction
electric field is pointing. so in this case it's propagating that way and the
electric field is pointing out where we turn it around like that it's
propagating now when the electric field is pointing that way turn around
and that the electric fields. that way of course this is going back and forth
gazillions of times a second to use the technical term that's all you really
need to know you've got this this characteristic of the wave which tells you
basically in which plane it's vibrating so what the polarized dose is when
you've got the lights that you got all that the light that's in this room and
that light is is basically on polarized right that means start that it's got
some light with which are like that so much I like that so much like that so
much like that all right range of different polarizations so all the lightness
room wasn't on or random but it was actually going in one direction then
what you have is if you align your Polaroid in the direction of the eighth of
the electric field then what you find is that they like and get through very
simply however if you rotate it rhyme just like i did with the polar bi big for
them it doesn't get through and that's a very very useful property of light
of certain materials like Polaroid so what I want to see Hugo what what
happens is that you use these glasses so in one side the simplest version
of these is that on one side we have a Polaroid basically which is aligned
like this and on the other side of a polarizer polaroid film which is aligned
like this so what happens is that you tickles - different versions of the
movie which are found in different commerce and you polarize you put a
polarizer in for each one of those cameras as well and that means that the
light coming from the screen associated with the left i say is polarized this
way and the light coming from the screen associate with the right eye is
polarized this way and then you put these on and now bingo you've got a
way of differentiating distinguishing between what should be going to the
left and what should be going to the right is very clever but yet you're
watching two movies and once with slightly different scenes and then you
are using the polarization of the light coming from the screen to to trick
your brain into thinking well okay what I'm seeing here is is real life and
therefore it must have a depth I told a little fib it isn't really linear
polarization here what we actually have with these glasses are many of
these glasses is something called search of polarization

there instead of this electric field being in the plan like this it rotate
around its rotating like this or in the other direction it can be rotating like
this and we call that left and right circularly polarized light because if you
look if you imagine i think it's going like this it's troubling for but if you just
look in this plan where you see the circle and circle either going like that
was going like that so the tip or we described in terms of a vector an
electric field vector which rotates around that would look so good if we
were feeling in three days oh it would have looked really good yes but it's
the same it's the same principle to you can have left and right circularly
polarized like you might argue about what is this now look like so it's so
what that was loud you have you been tricky because what you have to do
to convert circuit what you do is you take out circularly polarized light and
you convert it to linear polarized like and then use the same approach
where is the conversion happens with conversion happens here you've
basically got within the glasses you've got you've got a polarizer we've
also got something that converts it circularly polarized like two linearly
polarized light so why don that like what complexity than what because for
various reasons are not going to go into you unless we want to make an
hour long video I it does various advantages time circularly polarized light
in terms of the ability to move your head around to keep the the depth
why you have you heard of different angles which you don't get from the
new polarization but these are really amazing that I'm gonna do something
that I've never done before and sixty symbols video I'm going to invite you
ready to come to the toilet with me I've told you about circular polarization
now one of the remarkable things with MERS is that murder will convert
right circularly polarized light so like that's going to say this direction into
the other direction so when it will not light which is polarized in a
particular handedness as we call it right or left it's the more it gets
converted from right-handed two left-handed you know that's really
amazing because now when we look at these and I invited to do this at
home it's really quite quite neat and i'll certainly be bringing this home
and doing it with I'm sure to my daughter's evening and you put it in front
of the mirror and what you can see is that as you go from this I to this I
that it appears black so looking downs for it can see so in this case now
the one on the left is black one on the what right you can see through we
now move over to this one one on the right is black and the other one you
can see through what the hell is going on there so that light is coming
from all the lights in here it's bouncing off my face and it's striking the
mirror and then it's coming back and hitting me so what's happening here
is that the light comes down strike my fears bounces off my face goes true
this thing right now initially all that light is randomly polarized that's right
and left circularly polarized however remember this thing acts as a filter so
which it make sure that only like with a particular polarization state can
get through this is where it gets really clever so it comes true that's true
here that light has got a particular polarization state which this one is left
true let's say right-handed strikes the murderer the murderer changes of
polarization state so it comes back and oh dear I can't get through
because I've now got the opposite polarization state which is really quite
clever so it's a really nice example of them from well you can look into is
classical physics quantum physics but quantum physics at the movies

basically it's a really really clever example of of polarization I think and I'm
blown away by this type of technology it's it's it's really quite need we
could perhaps going to treat ed television but that's a different type of
technology much maybe we'll leave to another day