[by MarketWire]

Advertisers looking to increase memory retention among audiences should seriously investigate 3D, says a leading producer of stereoscopic 3D commercials, James Stewart. In a presentation today delivered at the Ontario Centres for Excellence (OCE) Discovery 2011 conference, Geneva Film Co. founder and director James Stewart shared startling statistics. He showed the use of 3D in advertising yields eye-popping returns in memory retention with audiences exhibiting 92% total recall of an ad, with 68% of that number showing a higher likelihood of following through with a purchase of the product advertised – a significant increase over the same commercial in 2D. Quoting studies from multiple independent sources – including ESPN, Xpand and Texas Instruments, the data shows an average increase in viewer retention of 15%.

Showing examples of his 3D work used in customer testing, Stewart said, “For a nominal increase in production costs, you get a 15% – 20% increase in ad recall. Who does not want that?” But advertising is not the only medium where retention rates are boosted through the use of 3D. Stewart also provided the Discovery audience with powerful data from a study conducted in the UK on behalf of Texas Instruments, showing that the use of 3D as a learning method in the classroom also improved a pupil’s understanding of a difficult topic. Children’s mean scores in lessons taught using 3D ranked 8.33 out of 10 while traditionally taught returned mean scores of 7 out of 10.

“3D is now prominent in our movie theaters and is becoming increasingly acknowledged by the advertising community as the powerful and immersive advertising medium. And, based on information I’ve shared at this conference, clearly 3D has legs beyond commercial use,” says Stewart. “Now we have the empirical research to validate what our gut and the rising audience attendance rates in theatres have been telling us all along. 3D is not just here to stay – it is going to dominate communication channels in the future,” says Stewart.

Since producing its first 3D commercial in 2008, Geneva has fielded steadily increasing demand for its 3D expertise as advertisers race to claim first to market rights in their respective brand categories. Geneva has produced an array of 3D commercials for such brand leaders as Sprint, JCPenney and Lexus.

About James Stewart & Geneva Film Co.

James Stewart is a digital filmmaking pioneer. He has produced and directed leading-edge film productions for brands such as Toyota, Ford, Acura, Hyundai, TD Canada Trust, CIBC, Panasonic, Xerox, Bayer among others. Through his production company, Geneva Film Co., James has produced over 25 projects in digital 3D including cinema commercials, concerts, stop-motion and CG animation. Recent projects include 3D cinema commercials for Lexus LFA, Sprint and JCPenney, Ontario 4D for the Vancouver 2010 Olympics, live 3D concert films of the Montreux Jazz Festival and Kylie Minogue, a science documentary with Cornell University, the stop-motion film Foxed! and Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams. He has also worked with the Rolling Stones, Justin Timberlake and The Olson Twins.

Stewart is a sought-after consultant on 3D, speaking alongside celebrated 3D authorities Jeffrey Katzenberg and James Cameron at events such as TED 2011, the 3D Entertainment Summit, 3DX in Singapore, the Banff World Media Festival, and Cannes Lions in France. For more information about Geneva Film Co. visit www.genevafilmco.com.

About OCE Discovery Discovery brings together key players from industry, academia, government, the investment community as well as entrepreneurs and students to pursue collaboration opportunities.

Garnering close to 2,500 attendees and more than 325 exhibitors, Discovery is a showcase of leading-edge technologies, best practices and research from sectors such as health, manufacturing, digital media and cleantech, including energy, environment and water.

See the original post here:  http://sports.tmcnet.com/news/2011/05/19/5523129.htm

[by Chris Chinook, Display Daily]

I’m attending and reporting from SID’s DisplayWeek confab in Los Angeles this week. What I have seen so far is a lot of interest in LCD technology that can create switchable lenses or can rotate polarization. The first is of interest to autostereoscopic display developers, while the latter is of interest to display makers who offer passive-polarized 3D glasses-based solutions.

One of the more common approaches to making an eyewear-free 3D display is to use a lenticular sheet. This is a plastic sheet that consists of long cylindrical lenses that are aligned diagonally to the LCD imaging panel. This helps direct views to the eyes in 3D mode, but it can distort the image if you want to use the panel for 2D content.

To address this, researchers are developing liquid crystal device structures that can create a lens in one state that is optically transparent in the other state. This allows the lenses to be turned on or off, thus increasing the utility of the panel. An undistorted 2D image is certainly a requirement for an Autostereoscopic 3DTV solution, with switching lenses being one way to get there.

The first products based on switchable lenticular arrays are coming this year, most notably a laptop from Toshiba. I don’t know if this is on exhibit at SID yet (I will find out), but there were a number of interesting papers given by researchers from the U.S. and Taiwan.

For example, researchers from Kent State University described a project that created a LC lens with a tunable focus. The use of diffractive and refractive designs was explored and explained.

The University of Central Florida is quite active with several projects including a design that electronically moves the switchable lens laterally as well as a new design for a switchable lens using Blue-Phase liquid crystal. You will be hearing more about Blue-Phase LCs because they have the capability for very fast switching, potentially allowing field sequential LCDs. That means panel makers can triple resolution (no spatial color filter matrix) and reduce costs. The University is very active in this area and commercialization of products now seems 2-3 years off.

National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan is also quite active and showcased several design options.

Polarization switching is the other big theme. The concept was highlighted two years ago at SID by LG Display who calls the process Active Retarder. They presented a paper on this again this year, but it would seem most of their efforts at this time are focused on Film Patterned Retarder (FPR) rather than Active Retarder. The key advantage of the Active Retarder approach is that it allows the delivery of full resolution images to each eye and the use of passive polarized glasses, without vertical viewing angle restrictions (FPR offers half resolution per eye with some vertical viewing angle restrictions).

But two other groups are taking up the charge. One is RealD and Samsung LCD, which showed their Active Shutter version of the technology at SID. We saw their demos in a private suite at CES and we were quite impressed. I have not yet had a chance to see it on the show floor at SID.

The other group is being led by LC Tech that has developed a very fast (400Hz switching) double LCD cell approach. This has been commercialized as a polarization switcher by Lightspeed Design for Cinema and ProAV applications. LC Tech is now working with Seiko Epson to adapt the technology to LCD panels.

These polarization switching panels are fairly simple devices. Both LGD and RealD use a scanning approach (RealD uses 8 bands that switch in synchrony with the row scanning), while LC Tech uses a single cell.

The big question for commercialization for flat panels is the cost of this additional LCD element. Clearly, current TFT LCD fabs are way too costly to make this component, so these parties are trying to understand the manufacturing options and fab investment costs to determine if and when commercial products will come. Samsung and RealD seem comfortable enough with the solution to have announced availability of 23-inch and 27-inch monitor products by the end of 2012, but did not say when up to 55″ TVs would come to market. Essentially, the industry will need a Gen 8 to Gen 11 fab for TN/STN panels for these polarization switchers, if cost-effective LCD TVs are to come to market. Anyone heard of one of those?

See the original post here:  http://displaydaily.com/2011/05/18/switchable-lenses-and-polarizers-grab-attention-at-sid/