Advertising and 3D

Audiences in the '50's

I had the good fortune to attend an Advertising week session with James Stewart, founder, producer and director from Gemini Films Co. This is a write up of that session and some background research.

James Stewart, Ad Week

3D movies and images have existed since the 1950’s but until the advent of digital projection these movies were plagued with poor user acceptance.


Once simple reason is found on the projectionist’s floor. 3D media is dependent on two images being displayed simultaneously – if an edit is made to one reel but not another than the timing is off and can easily cause nausea.

creating 3D images in Photoshop

It costs upwards of 200K to outfit a theatre for 3D viewing but new players in the market are offering 35mm Film projectors a 20-25K conversion kit- but that does not include the cost of the glasses.


Content Success

IMAX Digital films are one of the primary reasons for the resurgence in renovating theatres to accomodate 3D content delivery but Avatar still holds the lead at 2.4 billion in global sales.


Other than the Avatar blockbuster, one of the more successful genre of 3D films in the past couple of years have been concert movies. Hanna Montana: Best of Both Worlds and Jonas Brothers took in 3 5million and 19 million receptively.

65% of the profit for Alice in Wonderland and How to Train Your Dragon came from 3D screens. According to the International 3D Society, 33% of 2010's box office take was from 3D media.

All directors will be forced to move to 3D - or else leave millions on the table. Even Scorsese, one of the last hollywood holdouts is making the leap with his upcoming Hugo Cabret.

Sky TV in the UK has outfitted many of the pubs in London with 3D TV to push the adoption.

ESPN has a full time channel and the BBC has announced that they will be broadcasting the 2012 Olympic games in 3D.

YouTube has a 3D channel


Advertising Campaigns - Print


It seems that every advertiser is jumping on the 3D print bandwagon. Even advertisers with no 3D content. A recent car advertisement told viewers to come to their showroom to experience the new model in 3D.

Wonderbra Campaign

Wonderbra put up a 6ft billboard outside Waterloo station and handed out 3D glasses to people passing by.

Crest Whitestrips released their "Kiss Me in 3D" print campaign.






Advertising Campaigns - TV and Theatre

As expected, the biggest advertiser for 3D content so far are the equipment manufacturers themselves. Sony, Toshiba, Hitachi and LG have all launched campaigns in theatres to promote their 3D technology.

Other campaigns include the 2009 Superbowl which feature 3D advertisements from Dreamworks (Monster vs Aliens) and Pepsi's SoBe Lizard.


Costs 


According to Stewart, the cost for producing a commercial in 3D approaches approximately 10-25% more than the equivalent 2D commercial.

Creating CG in 3D only increased the costs by 10%. The costs for converting from 2D to 3D run from about 5k-100k per minute of footage. In Toronto, the choices of editing suite availability is limited to Deluxe.

Impact

There are only a few studies that have been completed looking at the effectiveness of 3D over 2D but the results are impressive.

One study was completed by ESPN during the 3D delivery of world cup soccer series. Cued recall and purchase intent for an ad increased - 68% for the 2D ad and 83% for the 3D ad. Ad liking increased from 67% to 84%.

A DLP study looked at 1000 students in Chicago who viewed content in 3D saw their test scores rise by 29-35%.


How 3D works

Visual fields converging

Modern 3D systems try to replicate the functions of human vision. Our vision is referred to as stereoscopic or binocular vision – evolutionally, this gives us an advantage determining depth and distance of objects. Our eyes, working as a team gives us two slightly different views of the same image. You can test these different images by holding your finger at arms length and viewing it with both eyes open and then closing first one eye and then the other. One of the images will be slightly offset from the other. This is refereed to as eye dominance. The brain, receiving both of these images at the same time, automatically combines them by matching up the similarities and adding the small differences in viewpoint.


Our eyes will converge at a close object and will diverge (to parallel) at images further away. Children have a much smaller ocular distance, which is why equipment manufactures have issued warnings on their use in the young reporting that it may cause nausea or imped the development of regular vision.


This is exactly how modern 3D systems work. There are two lenses that converge and diverge mechanically to five the illusion that objects are moving towards or away from the viewer.


Anaglyph images

Moon Landing

This is the more familiar of the systems to North American audiences- everyone recognizes the traditional red and blue lenses - and has been used since the 1950’s. Two images are captured by the camera and displayed as two colour layers superimposed on e each other. The brain itself performs the colour correction. Unlike the eighties, technology has evolved to use polarized glass to selectively screen out the colour channel rather than the traditional red and blue gels.



These type of glasses are cheap to mass produce and some prominent makers of regular polarized sunglasses will be embedding this technology in upcoming models.


This technology has some drawbacks – images are somewhat degraded and fine detail is lost.


Active Shutter

3D TV with AS

The alternate system to the Anaglyph method is called Active Shutter display. Going back to the example of above of holding out your finger and first closing one eye and then closing the other, active shutter displays mimic this behavior albeit at a much higher rate of 60 frames per second mechanically. This is the technology that is finding it’s way into the new breed of 3D televisions. With each frame duplicated and the glasses mechanically closing a shutter at 60 frames a second, the minimum refresh rates of the television have to be at 120 mhz.






3D TV and Monitors


With almost 6.5 million 3D TV sets sold in the first year, it is easy to figure out where this is going. Equipment manufacturers are not making the investment in 2D sets anymore. Most 3D televisions have the capability to disaply 2D content as well – and in most cases the 3D TV doing 2D content is displayed better than the 2D sets still on the market.

Autostereoscopic 3D TV 

Toshiba is offering a 65inch 3D television that does not require the use of special glasses - similar to Philips lenticolor prototype. There are two competing methods for glasses-less viewing. The less popular method uses cylindrical plastic lenses pasted on a transparent sheet which is in turn stuck to the surface of the LCD screen. The second method, called parallax barrier, shows the most promise for consumers and is being actively pursued by Sharp and LG. This method, instead of using lenses, has a liquid crystal surface with slots that correspond to the columns of pixels. These columns correspond to the alternating images which shutter based on a small electrical charge.

Other 3D devices LG has announced that in 2011 they will be releasing a 3D phone based on Nvidia's new dual core Tegra 3D chipset. A rumoured tablet will follow. Rumours are circulating that the iPhone 5 will be 3D enabled. Fuji, among others have launched a line of 3D digital cameras aimed at the consumer market