STEVEN SPIELBERG, the most influential visionary in Hollywood, is involved in patenting what film-makers been dreaming of for decades — 3-D movies that can be viewed without special glasses.

Spielberg, who pioneered the summer blockbuster with Jaws and the era of computerised special effects in Jurassic Park, now believes the technology for such 3-D films has finally arrived.

In an interview with a Hollywood trade magazine he has let slip that he is involved in patenting a system which thrusts the viewer inside the film, “inside the experience which will surround you top, bottom, on all sides”.

If the technology wins acceptance, it will revolutionise cinemas, forcing them to tear out their traditional screens and replace them with giant plasma screens specially adapted to project Spielberg’s 3-D images.

It could also revitalise the film industry which is facing declining audiences and fiercer competition from rival entertainment media such as advanced video games.

There is, however, one big question: will it work? Film-makers have been experimenting with 3-D since 1903 and there has been a succession of over-optimistic claims that it is about to become a mainstream technology.

The first screening of a 3-D film for a paying audience came in June 1915 when a short film, Jim the Penman, was shown in New York featuring scenes from rural America. It was treated as a novelty and forgotten. In the 1950s there were more claims that 3-D had finally arrived with the releases of Bwana Devil, which depicted attacks by man-eating lions, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon. But, again, the format failed to take off.

Hollywood tried again in 1983 with Jaws 3-D, the third of four films about killer sharks eating Americans. It famously ended with the shark’s teeth emerging from the screen and heading towards the audience.

It too was a flop — and since then even pornographers, the most obvious beneficiaries of 3-D, have been scared away by the technical issues and cost.

The key problem is that, so far, all 3-D formats have needed viewers to wear glasses with a red filter for one eye and a green filter for the other. Some find these cause headaches and disorientation.

Doing away with those glasses is crucial to taking 3-D into the mainstream. Spielberg’s timing may be right: several big electronics manufacturers have recently demonstrated plasma screens that can project 3-D images visible to the unaided eye.

One of them, Opticality Corporation, recently demonstrated a 3-D screen that was 14ft 6in wide and 10ft high — approaching the size of a cinema screen. It is believed that Spielberg’s potential patent describes a way of adapting such technologies to operate on that larger scale.

The essential requirement for all 3-D viewing is to create two slightly different images from any given scene and then project one into the left eye and the other into the right eye.

Until now this has been done using two cameras to film each scene. The two sets of images are then projected simultaneously but the coloured glasses worn by viewers mean that the left eye sees the images from only one of the films while the right eye views the images from the other film. This system fools the brain into thinking it is seeing a three-dimensional scene rather than a flat screen.

The new technology uses the same principle but instead of two cameras it uses a powerful computer to split each image as if it were being seen from slightly different perspectives.

These images are then projected simultaneously out of the screen but at slightly different angles. This is done by subdividing the screen with tiny strips of filter material.

Spielberg and other directors have been seeking a 3-D breakthrough for some years. He recently linked up with James Cameron, director of Titanic, still the most financially successful film in history, and George Lucas, creator of the Star Wars universe, to lobby American cinema managers to prepare for the “3-D revolution”.

Lucas and Cameron are, however, keeping their options open. Lucas has announced plans to produce 3-D versions of all six Stars Wars film.

Cameron is making his next film, a science fiction epic, provisionally called Battle Angel, in 3-D. All these will, however, still require the dreaded glasses.

In the end, technology may not be enough. Peter Guber, the producer of such films as Batman and Rain Man, said last week: “People do not go to movies to admire the computer technology, the zeros and ones, but for the oohs and the aahs. Successful film-making always come down to the fundamentals — a good story well told.”

Additional reporting: Ben Dowell

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