3D high def telly is ancient news

Photo / Supplied

Opinion

You may feel smug about that shiny 1080p HD LCD TV sitting in your lounge, but chances are that like me, you'd be gobsmacked to learn that colour 3D high resolution TV was invented over 70 years ago by a brilliant Scotsman inventor extraordinaire, John Logie Baird.

Whilst 3D television has recently whipped technology media into a frenzy of hyperbole, few, if any have commented that its actually old hat and was originally demonstrated 81 years ago by Baird with what he called "stereovision".

Compared to today's state of the art digital LCD or Plasma TVs, Bards stereovision was constructed out of a motley collection of mechanical parts including an old hatbox, a pair of scissors, darning needles, a few bicycle light lenses, a used tea chest, sealing wax and some glue.

The first stereovision demonstration took place on August 10,1928 at the Baird Laboratories in Long Acre, England before an audience of astonished scientists and the press.

Stereovision scanned two left and right images and combined them using a series of prisms, and fast spinning discs that alternated both left and right images so rapidly that the assembled dignitaries saw a 3D image.

Technology is a fast moving beast, working in dog years (e.g. 7 years for every one human year). The upshot of this is 3D TV is officially a technology geriatric and still hasn't gone mass market yet.

Whilst Baird's mechanical TV system was the first to really deliver the 3D goods and was easily years (if not decades) ahead of its time, there were disadvantages. Mechanical parts wore down and broke. Watching Bards TVs could also be a noisy experience as the mechanical parts worked whirred away to weave their video magic.

Not being one to rest on his laurels, Baird was continually refining TV and eventually created a high resolution TV capable of displaying 600 lines of screen information (only 25 lines less than present day analogue TV) that used electronic components instead of mechanical parts.

This new design was also the first to use the now standard picture tube configuration with separate red, green and blue electron guns to paint the image onto the screen one line at a time. Most amazingly, Baird's TV displayed a full 3D image with no nerdy-looking glasses required.

Sadly Baird's brilliance was cut short and he died suddenly in 1946. Had he survived to the present day, he would witnessed the meteoric rise of television as it grew to span the entire planet, becoming the world's most popular form of entertainment.

Baird may have been be frustrated at the near glacial progress of television since he invented it, but if his son is to be believed, he'd have most likely taken exception to much of its content. On a UK television programme "Don't Get Me Started" that aired in 2006, Malcolm Baird said that if his father had known how TV would turn out, he'd probably have dropped it and turned his many skills onto other inventions.