3D Glossary
Glossary of Common 3DTV Terminology
2D - Two dimensional. An object or image which has no depth. Instead it only has two dimensions, width and height.
3D - Three dimensional. A 3D object appears to have three dimensions; width, height, and depth.
Active Shutter Glasses - Glasses that provide a 3D viewing experience by synchronizing with a display and turning on/off the light entering each eye many times a second.
Amblyopia - also known as ‘lazy eye’, involves lowered visual clarity and/or weakened muscle control in just one eye. The result is often a loss of binocular depth perception and stereoscopic vision.
Anaglyph - The red/blue color glasses for displaying 3D introduced in the nineteenth century.
Aspect Ratio - The relationship of a screen’s width to its height. For example, a 16:9 aspect ratio means there are 16 inches of screen width for every 9 inches of height.
Auto-Stereoscopic Displays - Displays a 3D image without the need for glasses.
Depth Perception - Also referred to as stereo vision and stereopsis. Depth Perception refers to the ability to see in 3D to allow us to be able to judge the distances of objects and features.
Frame Rate - The number of frames or images that are projected or displayed per second.
Infrared Emitter - (IR Emitter) Sold with wireless 3-D shutter glasses; provides a method of transmitting the 3D sync signal to the glasses by sending out an infrared signal.
Interlaced Scan - (denoted with an “i,” e.g.,1080i) Each line of the picture is drawn in alternating order. All the odd lines are drawn, then all the even ones.
Lenticular Lens - curved optics which allow both eyes to see a different image of the same object at exactly the same time
Monovision - Method of using one eye for distance vision and the other eye for near vision. The dominant eye, or the one that would be used to focus on a camera, becomes the distance eye and the other eye is focused for close vision.
Multiplexing - This is the process of fusing the two images needed for a stereoscopic display within a bandwidth.
Multi-View Coding - An amendment to the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC compression standard that enables efficient encoding of sequences captured simultaneously from multiple cameras using a single video stream.
Parallax Barrier - Allows an LCD display to show a 3D image to a viewer without the need for glasses.
Passive Glasses - Glasses that provide a 3D viewing field with some 3D HDTVs that have special, polarized screens.
Pixel - Tiny dots that convey light and combine to form a video picture. Short for “picture element.”
Progressive Scan - (denoted with a “p,” e.g.,1080p and 720p) Each line of the picture is drawn in sequential order.
Resolution - The number of horizontal and vertical pixels viewable on-screen; the higher the number, the better the image. HDTVs display 720 or 1080 active, viewable lines of resolution.
Scan Modes - Defines how often, and how much, the video picture is redrawn when displaying moving images on the screen.
Stereoscopic - Displays a 3D image through the use of glasses. Provides a different image to the viewer’s left and right eyes, giving the viewer depth perception.
Stereoscopic 3D - Two images which were captured from slightly different angles, which makes them appear three dimensional when they are viewed together.
Stereo Vision - Two eye views combine in the brain to create the visual perception of one three-dimensional image.
