RealD

RealD announced that Samsung Electronics decided not to make TVs that use RealD's active-switching 3D technology. Samsung says that the global economic climate dragged down consumer demand.

RealD says that the license agreement with Samsung still holds, but they are looking for other partners to commercialize their technology. The company's stock fell around 14% following the announcement.

Back in January 2011 Samsung and RealD announced they will jointly develop 3D panels using the new active-switching technology. Now Samsung Electronics say that they expect 23" and 27" 3D panels (for PC monitors) that use this technology to be available in early 2012. 55" panels will follow suit later on.

The new panels offer full resolution HD viewing in 3D (for each eye) and are compatible with RealD's 3D cinema eyewear. The idea is to provide the active-shutter technology in the display and not in the glasses.

RealD announced that they have now over 15,000 3D cinema system installations. They say that installations are ramping up quickly in anticipation of the summer movie lineup. Five years ago there were only about 100 such installations. In fact in the last 12 months RealD installed base jumped 182%.

RealD further says that over 430 million moviegoers have experienced a feature film in RealD 3D.

RealD announced that they will make a universal 3D glasses platform that will be compatible with 3D TVs sold by most major consumer electronics brands. RealD will offer their SoC (System-on-a-chip) available to manufacturers to build their own 3D glasses.

RealD will be using Freescale's RF platform and Broadcom's Bluetooth chip, as was announced before.

RealD announced today that they are using Broadcom's Bluetooth technology in their new active-shutter 3D glasses. Bluetooth has several advantages over IR (used in most glasses) - you don't have to have line-of-sight, and it also offers much longer battery life. It also suffers from less interference from other devices.

Update: we learned that RealD is also collaborating with Freescale to develop a new RF technology for active-shutter glasses. It is based on Freescale's RF4CE platform (which uses a MC1323x SoC). This new technology is also better than IR for basically the same reasons as the Bluetooth one. So RealD is not gambling on just one technology - they want to use both IR and Freescale's own RF system...

Samsung and RealD announced that they will jointly develop a new active-shutter 3D display technology called RDZ. This new technology, based on LCD panels will offer full resolution 3D using the same RealD passive 3D glasses used in cinemas.

It appears that the idea is that the active-shutter part will go into the TV itself - it will be an "Active-switching LCD". This will enable it to use cheap RealD glasses (like the ones used in the cinema) and also offer no resolution reduction.

We just reported that Vizio's XVT-3D TVs are now shipping, and now we hear that Vizio is using RealD's 3D technology in those TVs: they support the RealD format, and also use active-shutter glasses that integrate RealD 3D lens and synchronization protocol.