TrioScopics 3D Deal With Fox to Yield Two More DVDs With Bundled Glasses

UNIVERSAL CITY, Calif. -- Two more Fox DVD releases each packaged with four sets of anaglyph 3D glasses from TrioScopics will arrive next month, following Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs in 3D that’s being released Tuesday in the same bundle configuration, TrioScopics CEO John Lowry told Consumer Electronics Daily at the 3D Entertainment Summit. He declined to name them. In announcing Ice Age early this week, Fox stressed that the DVD would be “playable on all conventional home entertainment equipment.” Fox didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Despite the arrival of more advanced active-shutter and passive 3D solutions for the home, Lowry said he was confident his company’s anaglyph solution will remain the most viable solution for most consumers for quite a while. The adoption of such new 3D products will “not happen overnight,” he said. It will take 2.5-3 years for a true market to emerge in which companies can sell enough products to be profitable, he predicted. The active glasses are much more costly than anaglyph glasses, often coming in at over $100 each compared to only 15-20 cents each for anaglyph ones, Lowry said. It’s “going to take a little while” for the cost to come down significantly on active glasses because the market isn’t growing quickly, he said. While passive glasses can be manufactured much more cheaply than active ones, he said there remains the dilemma that passive glasses, like active ones, won’t work on all TVs. There’s no compatibility issues with anaglyph glasses, he said.

Lowry also expressed little concern on autostereoscopic 3D systems that don’t require glasses at all. A true market for that technology in the home consumer space is “at least 10 years away,” he said. Executives at other companies have offered much more optimistic forecasts for that technology. Sensio Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer Richard LaBerge told us at the Summit, “I don’t see it before seven years from now.” Others have offered even more optimistic forecasts in the past. Autostereoscopic solutions will initially be used for personal viewing devices including the Nintendo 3DS handheld game system that will ship by March 31 and maybe PCs and airline video systems, LaBerge said. Getting the technology to work effectively for larger screens remains challenging, he said.

The Ice Age DVD packaging prominently displays the inclusion of four TrioScopics 3D glasses with the movie, Lowry showed us. TrioScopics first discussed such a deal with Fox one year ago this week, he said. The 3D technology company also demonstrated earlier home video releases that used its anaglyph 3D solution: Coraline and Journey to the Center of the Earth.

TrioScopics had shipped 75 million pairs of its 3D glasses as of this week, with about 68 million to 69 million sold through to consumers, Lowry said. Like typical anaglyph glasses, the company’s glasses usually feature cardboard frames, one red lens and one cyan lens. The company shipped about 20 million pairs of glasses bundled with Coraline alone and it received an order for another 500,000 for that movie in July, he said. It shipped about 16 million pairs of glasses for Journey to the Center of the Earth and about 14 million for My Bloody Valentine 3D, he said. All three of the movies were shipped in 3D for Blu-ray, unlike the new Ice Age movie.

TrioScopics keeps working to improve its technology, Lowry said, telling us the company is on its second generation now and will keep up its R&D program to get to a third generation at an unspecified time. For the second-generation version of its solution, the company changed the lens system and made other enhancements, he said.

The company will also start selling its glasses direct online, Lowry told us. It’s “trying to settle the shipping and handling” issue and still working on the price, he said. The company will likely sell them with a four-set minimum, he said.

3D Entertainment Summit Notebook

3D hasn’t lost its “sheen,” Andrew Stucker, national accounts manager for Digital Cinema Solutions at Sony Electronics, said Wednesday. “It hasn’t lost anything.” Agreeing, Peter Koplik, executive vice president of sales and marketing at Masterimage 3D, said, “There will always be good and bad movies.” The comments came after DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg complained in a keynote about the inferior quality of certain 3D theatrical releases this year that he said is starting to lead to distrust among consumers (CED Sept 16 p1). Koplik also cautioned not to draw “premature conclusions” about how much extra consumers will be willing to spend for a 3D movie compared to a 2D one in the future. He also warned that if film companies were looking at next quarter’s earnings and not working to create a strong 3D infrastructure, the industry could destroy the work that’s been done to grow the format. He, like Katzenberg, said “alternate light sources are on the horizon” that will allow 3D movies to be displayed brighter. But he declined to predict how long it will take for that to arrive. There will always be a business for theatrical 3D movies, even when home 3D becomes a significant market, Stucker said. The two markets go hand in hand, with the home market needed to extend the life of 3D movies released in theaters, he said.

Sony is marketing 3D TVs that use active shutter glasses, but Alec Shapiro, senior vice president of sales and marketing for Professional Solutions of America at Sony Electronics, said a no-glass solution is ultimately what will be ideal. That’s “really what you want to get to,” he said. Sports drove the adoption of HD and he’s hoping “to repeat the same model” with 3D. Sports will significantly help sell 3D TVs, he said.

Hollywood still doesn’t get videogames, said Lorne Lanning, president of game developer Oddworld Inhabitants. Games are financed like typical Silicon Valley companies and much differently than the way movies are financed, he said. Venture capitalists look for people who have failed in the game industry because that implied the person had experience and probably learned something, he said. But Hollywood executives never admit failures, he said.