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When the Olympics were 3D (except not really)

Posted 09.12.2024

A New Millennium of 3D

The 3D craze comes and goes in cycles. More so than higher resolutions or HDR, there’s something intuitive about the idea of adding another literal dimension to media consumption as the next logical step forward. But it’s also a goal that has proven elusive outside of cinemas.[1]

Glass-free 3D has failed to materialize, 3D TVs are no longer in production and the UHD format for 4K Blu-rays does not even include 3D capabilities in its spec at all, so it would be fair to say that we’re in a bit of a 3D lull right now.


When talking about a big 3D boom, most people think of the year 2009 when James Cameron’s Avatar catapulted the concepts into public consciousness. But what I want to talk about took place almost a decade prior, before either active shutter or polarized 3D systems became truly mainstream, and no one knew where the trend could be heading. So it went to some weird places.

The Trend

It’s the year 2000 in Germany and 3D Television is, somehow, everywhere. At least that’s how it seemed to me as a child. I vividly remember the channel “Vox” offering 3D documentaries on history and exotic countries. Another station airs a (terrible) 3D mockumentary about ghost hunters around Halloween. Internationally, Discovery Channel broadcasts its “Shark Week” in 3D, and so on.

 

Actual movies seemed to sit this one out and most 3D programs were cheap made for TV productions. But one broadcast was high profile enough for everyone to talk about, even the adults: The 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney. The biggest sports event of the year and the public television channel ZDF was airing it in 3D. This was huge news. 3D glasses were included in TV guides, stocked in stores and the real fancy ones, styled with the logo of the Olympics, were distributed by opticians.

 

I got the glasses as soon as I could and I wasn’t disappointed with the results. Watching the athletes seemingly pop out of the screen, seeing the stadium take on actual depth and volume (as well as being scared by the cheap 3D ghost stories around Halloween) was absolutely one of my most important and formative experiences with media during my childhood. The concept of 3D had me hooked and didn’t want to take the glasses off again.

 

So 3D was neat but how exactly did they do it?

The Technology

The annoying thing about 3D is the peripherals and hardware that you need to have to view it. And we’re talking about a time when even in cinemas technology wasn’t really there yet.

So what technology would you guess was used for the Sydney Olympics and all the other programs?

 

I’d assume that most people, when they remember 3D media during the early 2000s, think about anaglyph 3D, the classic method with the iconic red/blue[2] glasses. Indeed, anaglyph was big back then, and you did not need a special TV to broadcast anaglyph images. Also the 3D glasses for the Olympics did in fact have colored lenses. Except instead of red and blue it was pale green and dark purple.

But surely this just meant that it was a specialized type of anaglyph, perhaps optimized for the color space of TV broadcasts. This is what I half believed for most of my adult life (we’ll get to the other half of doubt soon enough), but it turns that was wrong. Anaglyph was not involved.


If you think about it, there are some pretty glaring issues with broadcasting the Olympics in anaglyph. The most obvious being that anaglyph 3D looks absolutely terrible without the right glasses and most people who would have the right glasses are either small children or big nerds. As a member of the former group back in 2000 (and, of course, a member of the latter now), I just implicitly believed for a long time that naturally everyone owned 3D glasses.

 

But the ZDF is Germany’s second-largest TV channel received by literally anyone with a TV. And unlike “Shark Week” everyone with even a passing interest in sports would also be interested in the highlights of the Olympics. That’s potentially tens of millions of people and were they all going to run to the nearest optician and get their Olympics branded ZDF 3D glasses for 2,99€? Obviously not.

Additionally, even back then a major part of the ZDF’s demographic was middle-aged and older and your average grumpy and tech illiterate German senior citizen was definitely not about to fool around with some silly glasses.[3]

 

No, the ZDF couldn’t sacrifice the viewing experience of that many people. They had to find a way to make the program watchable for everyone while still delivering 3D for the nerds with their glasses. Luckily, there was a method that could accomplish just that.

The Pulfrich Effect

The Pulfrich effect is actually nothing new. It was first described in 1922 by a German optician and the general technical definition goes as follows: A normal subject perceives an object moving along an illusory 3D pathway because of an inter-eye discrepancy of illumination.

The effect is most often demonstrated using a pendulum, but since our topic is specifically about its application in video I’ll stick with that.

 

We start with a simple observation: Your brain needs more time to process a dark image than it needs for a bright image. This makes intuitively sense. It’s, after all, harder to see in the dark.

And what happens if you have a darkened lens in front of one of your eyes? Now one of the images you receive takes longer to “decode”, so we perceive whatever is before the darkened eye with a slight delay.

 

For looking at a static image or object, this makes no difference but once we add movement, real or on video, things start to get interesting.

Even at the standard frame rate of 24 fps the delay between the obscured and unobscured eye is significant enough that you are seeing one frame of the video on one eye while the other is still seeing a previous frame. If this happens while the camera is moving or spinning horizontally, one of those frames shows the subject at a slightly different angle.

 

And that’s the whole trick. Two 2D images at slightly different angles is exactly what our brain ordinarily receives through “normal” vision and just like usual the two are combined into one three-dimensional impression without the video having any actual 3D component.[4]


When you look at the TV with the purple/green Pulfrich glasses, the important part isn’t the coloration of the lenses. The important part is that the purple lens is darker than the green one.

 

And what was unique about the highlights of the Olympics isn’t that they were filmed with any special camera but that the camera was simply always moving or following a subject in motion. If the image stops moving the 3D effect goes away. If the motion is in the wrong direction (vertical), it also doesn’t work because our eyes aren’t vertical.

But I don’t even know much preparation went into these 3D compilations. Were there camera crews that were explicitly told to go wild and keep moving as much as possible? Or did the “3D” highlight reel merely assemble the shots from the normal broadcast that happened to feature the right kind of motion? Anyway, it worked and sports were the perfect showcase because one way or another most disciplines involve something moving.[5]

 

Now if I just wanted to recount a cool 3D trick I saw on TV once, I could stop here. But there was more to it. Almost as important as the 3D broadcasts themselves was that back then no one could tell me the actual principle behind it. That led to some strange situations.

Seeing and Believing

That the Olympia 3D glasses are using the Pulfrich effect isn’t terribly hard to figure out if you know what you’re looking for. But all this happened before scouring the internet for answers was everyone’s second nature and ZDF itself never revealed the secrets of their “technology” publicly.

 

If you look at a pair of Olympia glasses, you won’t see the word “Pulfrich” anywhere. Instead, besides the obvious sports branding, there’s some generic reference to a “Telcast 3-D System” mentioning that “Telcast 3-D is internationally patented”. This wasn’t really any help for an 8-year-old in the year 2000.[6]

 

It even seems to me now like coloring the lenses green and purple was done intentionally to obfuscate how the glasses actually worked by making them appear similar to anaglyph glasses. After all color is not required for the Pulfrich effect, a simple dark tinted lens paired with a clear lens[7]would have done the trick too. A slightly more generous reading of the situation could chalk it up to recognizability.Everyone expects 3D glasses to look green and red, so they designed them that way to fit that aesthetic, to prevent any confusion about their purpose.[8]

 

But something still doesn’t sit right with me about that. It’s one of those awkward facets of consumer culture where instead of explaining to the audience how a technology or just anything works, companies dress it up as something “familiar” and expect no one to think too hard about it.

 

So you could say the glasses themselves were sending mixed messages. In contrast to the anaglyph glasses, where the blue and red “shadows” pervading the 3D images were clearly somehow connected to coloration of the lenses, the Pulfrich glasses just seemed to be a magical thing without an obvious context that just worked. No one knew why. Not my friends, not my parents, not my friends’ parents.

It Didn’t Stop

So here’s where things got weird. I mentioned in the first section that I was so enamored with the glasses that I didn’t want to take them off again. So I didn’t. When the 3D logo in the corner of the screen signifying the 3D segment of the Olympics disappeared, I kept my glasses on anyway. I also didn’t take them off when I changed the channel, or when I watched a movie.

And to my amazement, even when viewing “non-3D” broadcasts the glasses kept working!

 

Sure, the strength of the depth effect varied from time to time but the moment the camera started moving consistently, basically for any sort of action sequence, the 3D was on full display, just as it had been for the “special” Olympic broadcasts. To my eight-year-old self, this felt like a miracle.

 

I kept the 3D glasses for years. I would watch Jurassic Park 3 in 3D, James Bond films, the terrible 1998 Godzilla movie, the first part Lord of the Rings. Eventually I watched The Matrix in 3D and those sweeping bullet time shots were truly perfect for maximum depth.

 

Video games with their near-constant movement were also a very natural fit. I remember spending many hours in Donald Duck Quack Attack or Starfox Adventures simply running around the levels and experiencing as much as I could in glorious 3D.


On the other hand, watching 2D animation was a surreal experience. Because relative motion is required and animated shows tend to feature characters moving in front of static backgrounds the Pulfrich effect didn’t really create a sense of space but rather the appearance of multiple flat layers.

When a character started moving or walking, preferably while the background was scrolling, they would seem to be lifted up from the background, including their feet, of course, and if only one portion of the character was animated that was the only part that gained “depth”.

Naturally, that’s not how 3D is supposed to work, but I watched lots of cartoons with the glasses anyway because it was just very interesting.

 

If there was one downside to the 3D effect, besides the reliance on motion, it was that the lenses did make everything noticeably bit darker (mostly a problem for movies with very gloomy scenes). The green/purple coloration of the lenses also had the effect of overlaying the picture with a strange shimmer, even though the colors were meant to “cancel out”.

guifr But I was so obsessed with the 3D effect that this was a worthwhile trade-off.[9]

 

But the most bizarre consequence was that the glasses also made reality more three-dimensional than it already was. Not surprising in hindsight as the Pulfrich effect was originally observed in this form and not via video. What I noticed was that if you spin around while looking at your outstretched hand with the glasses on, the background will feel “deeper back” in comparison to your hand than without the glasses. A similar effect happened if I ran in circles around an object. So something was clearly going that wasn’t limited to the TV. I just didn’t know what.

Doubt

All those strange effects that the glasses kept producing felt magical at the time, but there was also an unnerving sensation of doubt. Without knowing how the Pulfrich effect worked, it just didn’t make sense.

 

I could piece together that the effects had something to do with motion but that was it. Meanwhile my parents didn’t believe me. I don’t think I ever managed to convince them to watch anything “non-3D” with the glasses. They always supposed that it was just my imagination running wild, but at least they didn’t have any issues with just letting me carry on with my “fantasy”.

 

To me this situation was a bit frustrating yet not too bothersome. A part of me even tried to believe them. Maybe my imagination was producing three-dimensional effects maybe that’s just something you can imagine onto a picture, who knows?

 

But I knew that this “explanation” didn’t actually make sense, why would my imagination have those consistent and arbitrary limitations like only working those specific glasses and only visualizing depth in the presence of horizontal motion?


As an adult, the concept of your perception creating arbitrary things that can’t be there according to other people is disturbing to say the least. But as a kid you don’t worry about being nuts. When your model of reality is still actively developing strange and surprising stuff is added to the world fairly often.

 

And thinking back, remembering my reaction, or lack thereof, to other people telling me that the glasses couldn’t work like that and that I was imagining it, made me realize how differently I saw distinctions between people in general back then.

 

As a child you treat the notion of someone having a differing preference, opinion or any kind of vague difference from you as something completely opaque.

It doesn’t even occur to you to question where that disparity originates, what a view might be premised on, let alone trying to adjust your view of things to understand their perspective.

 

No, there is just that fundamental difference between people and it’s just there.[10] And if people are just magically different from each other then the 3D glasses working only for me when they shouldn’t be just one of those arbitrary contradictions.

Conclusion

Eventually, I did get tired of my Pulfrich glasses and moved on to other obsessions (some 3D related, others not). In the following years, I didn’t think much about what I saw back then or what it meant until only a few years ago I came across some websites discussing different 3D technologies, including Pulfrich glasses and finally everything I experienced made sense.

 

I don’t have my old Olympia 3D glasses anymore (they might still be gathering dust in some box at my parents’ house). So for this article I managed to track down a few unused ones on eBay just for to confirming all the various kinds of effects, just in case my memory did exaggerate the magnitude of the effect, but no. Everything was just as vivid (and just as inconsistent) as I remembered.

 

So what do we learn from all this? There seem to be a few options, pick the one you prefer:

 

  1. Sometimes, everyone else is just wrong.
  2. Companies really don’t like telling the whole story.
  3. I think we should bring 3D TVs back because it’s pretty neat, but maybe not with the Pulfrich effect, though.

 

As a side note, I tried to locate some footage of the ZDF Olympia Highlights designed for use with 3D but came up empty-handed. Once again it seems like you can find all the weird old stuff on the internet except the weird old stuff that you actually want to find.

  1. ^Of course an argument can be made movie studios are benefitting from this “arrangement”. 4k video on an enormous TV screen paired with a powerful surround sound systems can get modern home theater setups closer than ever to the real thing, making the exclusivity of 3D one of the main incentives for visiting the local cinema.
  2. ^Red/Cyan also seems to be a common type.
  3. ^There would have been a catastrophic wave of pensioners nagging their families and TV repairmen about their screen malfunctioning.
  4. ^There's a neat video demonstrating this effect by Tom Scott. As he explains, you don't need special glasses, sunglasses suffice.
  5. ^I doubt that there were 3D highlights of the weightlifting competition.
  6. ^By now you can find what seems to be the original patent on google patents.
  7. ^…or even no second lens at all, but then people would probably think the glasses came broken.
  8. ^This is of course less of a factor in more directly controlled environments like the cinema,[1]so it makes sense that there was no incentive for “helpful” visual cues there.
  9. ^By now, as someone who likes to be exact about white points and color calibrations, it no longer feels acceptable at all.[2]bithc
  10. ^While writing this, I of course realized that there are plenty of people who retain this sort of view as adults, which is quite sad.
  1. ^Directly controlled in the sense that you get handed a specific set of glasses right before the movie for that exact movie, which is very different from picking up a pair of 3D glasses from your optician to use them at some point with a special ZDF broadcast that you had to figure out from TV guides.
  2. ^Or perhaps I could try to deliberately tint and overexpose my TV color settings to make up for the color distortion of the Pulfrich glasses. Might be worth a try.

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