Stereoscopic Cinema and the Origins of 3-D Film, 1838-1952

10. The Stereoscopic Overture Finishes

10 The Stereoscopic Overture Finishes Autostereoscopic Cinema Autostereoscopic cinema has always been a "holy grail" for Utopian inventors , an extremely exotic and challenging subset of stereoscopic motion pictures. Many have foundered in its quest. In a November 1931 issue of the New York Times, an article appeared titled "New Screen Gives Depth to Movies" about cinematographic engineer Douglas F. Winnek and his stereoscopic projection of motion pictures, "which, it is said, makes possible a perspective of three dimensions without the necessity of any special viewing devices."1 Winnek's stated method used a new type of screen with a beaded cellophane surface, with each bead acting as a lens. Some 576 beads covered 1 square inch, and a standard binocular projection of left- and right-eye images purportedly separated the two views for binocular steropsis. In the same article, mention was made of Dr. R. T. A. Innés, an astronomer from South Africa, who "had perfected a system of stereoscopic film projection founded on a special optical appliance fitted near the screen."2 The autostereoscopic efforts derived from F. R. Ives s foundational patent of 1903, "Parallax Stereogram and Process of Making Same," which made stereoscopic images viewable without any optical device.3 It worked by alternating the left- and right-eye views vertically on a transparent line screen, using opaque lines with clear spaces between them. The line screen consisted of vertically running cylindrical lens elements, lenticules, so that these screens were typically called lenticular. With an 1899 patent titled "Pictorial Reproduction," John Jacobson had propounded the fundamental 164 Stereoscopic Cinema and the Origins of 3-D Film principle of alternating clear and opaque lines, but his patent was insufficiently detailed and most likely never reduced to practice.4 Frederic Ives's son, Herbert, of the Bell Telephone Laboratory, was an assiduous worker in the field of autostereoscopic cinema. On October 31, 1930, he presented his apparatus for autostereoscopic motion pictures in a first public demonstration to the Optical Society of America. According to an account of it in the New York Times: The pictures shown were small and on account of the experimental nature of the machine used, were visible only to small groups at a time. Dr. Ives said that the methods were susceptible of refinement and theoretically applicable to the production of motion pictures in relief, although at a cost now which would be practically prohibitive for commercial purposes.5 In the April 1932 issue of the Society of Motion Picture EngineersJournal , Herbert Ives wrote about the problems of projecting motion pictures in relief. By this time, he had begun to experiment with using a battery of projectors, as many as thirteen, for autostereoscopic projection upon a lenticulated screen. The disadvantages of this method, Ives wrote, "are the excessive refinement of all the apparatus parts, which could be avoided only in part by having recourse to a multiplicity of projecting units or excessive speeds of projection."6 On April 28, 1933, Ives demonstrated a further refinement of autostereocopic movies with added complexity to 500 members of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers in New York City. He had solved certain problems , but his ultimate prognosis was not hopeful, as he declared that there were "conditions which, in his opinion would keep motion pictures in depth as a laboratory curiosity forever, without practical application in a motion picture theatre." Close-ups were an impossibility, and Ives's means of production were incredibly complicated. He finally settled on a "device of photographing an object as seen in a curved mirror, to provide diversity of viewpoints, and recording it on a sensitized plate with convex ridges running from top to bottom on the top and back." Projection was equally complex : "The film must not shift by as much as one-hundredth of the width of a picture strip, or 1-50,000 of an inch in passing through the projector. He obtained this only by printing his picture strips on a disk which limited his total footage to the circumference of a disk about four feet in diameter."7 Sept. 3, 1935. H. E. IVES 2,012,995 STEREOSCOPIC MOTION PICTURE Original Filed Feb. 9, 1929 4 Sheets-Sheet 1 r,e.i. // \ \ / / // // // \ \ A //.¿ uü.íüljiii.iu>: BY INVENTOR H. ¿T. Ives ATTORNEY Herbert Ives's exceedingly complex autostereoscopic system, titled "Stereoscopic Motion Picture" in the patent (1935). 166 Stereoscopic Cinema and the Origins of 3...