Is there a 3D production company I can invest in?
Soon the demand for 3D content will explode!

Thanks for the info on the Russian system, I never heard of that before.

Do you remember what it was called?

But while 3-D itself never caught on, because of not advancing the plot, theatres in North America stuck to using anaglyphic or polarized glasses. In Russia, one other system, with a striped screen in front of the silver screen, was also used. This, however, required that the position of every seat in the theatre be calculated with respect to that grid, so the theatre had to be built especially for showing 3-D movies.

There was a cute animated clip about a girl and a cat done in this manner a while ago but for the life of me I can’t find it.

I think they actually could have made a polariser-glasses system work with 1920s technology; shutter-glasses would probably have been out of the question, or some huge and hideous mechanical contraption.

It also wouldn’t have been very hard to make a system that projected two images on the screen and required the audience to all go cross-eyed to lay the images on top of each other. That could have been done with a single projector, too, at the price of lower resolution. Such a solution would, of course, probably not be tolerable for the duration of a feature presentation.

BTW, Charlie, if you’re listening: MM here has been crashing IE for me all day. Firefox has no problems, however. I’ll try again later when I’m not behind the corporate fire curtain to see if it makes a difference. (It only happens when I click on an article or comment.)

http://www.reelzchannel.com/ar.....3-d-movies

I also like this explanation:
But even though the studios had thrown their support behind 3D movies, some flies began to land in the ointment. The first one (in the USA) was the rental deal that was forced onto the exhibitors by the distributors. Dual strip projection meant that, effectively, two prints of a 3D movie were supplied to the theatres – a left eye print and a right eye one. The distributors figured: two prints, twice the rental. The exhibitors soon discovered, though, that customers wouldn’t pay twice as much to see a 3D movie, especially because sometimes – and this led directly to the second big problem – you sometimes got sore eyes after half an hour watching a 3D picture! This was because some projectionists were more than a little casual when it came to 3D presentation. If one projector is slightly out of focus, or out of rack, the result is eye strain for the audience [see the accompanying article by Gary de Wan] as their eyes try in vain to correct the discrepancy. Occasionally, damaged frames would be removed and the ends of the film simply spliced together, instead of being replaced with the appropriate length of blank film, thus rendering the remainder of the film from that splice onwards, out of sync with the other. More eye strain! And while the exhibitors’ financial grievance was eventually resolved, some patrons eventually began to avoid a 3D presentation of a movie if they could see it flat somewhere else because they didn’t like having to wear the cardboard glasses. In fact, many theatres were booking single prints of 3D movies anyway (which were still marked ‘left’ or ‘right’) because they didn’t think 3D was worth all the effort and installation expense.

Don’t neglect to read the whole entry at http://widescreenmovies.org/WSM11/3D.htm