Third Magazine

Will 3D in sports pubs work?

Posted on 30. Jan, 2010 by "Mitch" in Cable, Sports, Televisions, Uncategorized

Not all group entertainment settings are the same.  These setting come in a couple of typical varities, a 2 to 6 person living room family setting, 30 to 500 person theater setting, and a 5 to 25 person home theater and entertainment room setting.  Then there are restaurants, sports pubs, museums, science centers, conference rooms, and auditoriums.  So after UK’s SkyTV put forth the idea of hosting 3D TV in 9 sports pubs in the UK, to give the public a sample of what they plan on rolling out in April to most of their subscribers, it got me thinking about when 3D TV is practical for a group of people and in which social settings.  And how much 3D glasses play a part in the limitations of the experience. As an obvious PR move, could this really damage people’s expectations for 3D in the home?

Lets face it, pretty much everyone knows that if you are going to be in a non-fixed entertainment setting (pretty much anything outside of a Movie with no commercials) that glasses don’t seem like an appealing option. Of course soccer is one of the rare sports that don’t have commercial breaks every 5 minutes. However people are considerably more social in a pub environment. Often times people are not close enough to the TV for the 3D experience to be of any real value.  What all of this means is that the glasses are just going to be a burden to deal with, unless you are seated at the perfect spot in front of a high quality projector screen.

In my opinion, the current non-passive 3D experiences will be successful in dedicated movie and gaming settings where the screen size take up a fair amount of a person’s direct point of view. This may seem obvious to most people, however in their excitement to promote new products I have a feeling 3D media companies could be shooting themselves in the foot by getting bad press for these staged events that don’t represent an environment where today’s 3D technologies really shine.

Once passive 3D screens start rolling out over the next 3 to 5 years, 3D will start to really take on a different meaning.  An autostereo screen in a bar will look more like viewing the game through a window.  Depth is key here, and as you may know already, depth is something we cannot emphasize more. 3D on a television really should be compared to looking through a window, with only a slight effect of “things coming out at you”.

So my basic point here is, the smaller the screen is in front of you, and the more social distractions around you, the greater the chance that you will be taking off your 3D glasses and asking the pub owner if there is a non-3D TV that you can view.