3D

3-D films have existed in some form since the 1950s, but had been largely relegated to a niche in the motion picture industry because of the costly hardware and processes required to produce and display a 3-D film, and the lack of a standardized format for all segments of the entertainment business. Nonetheless, 3-D films were prominently featured in the 1950s in American cinema, and later experienced a worldwide resurgence in the 1980s and '90s driven by IMAX high-end theaters and Disney themed-venues. 3-D films became more and more successful throughout the 2000s, culminating in the unprecedented success of 3-D presentations of Avatar in December 2009 and January 2010.
Stereoscopic motion pictures can be produced through a variety of different methods. Over the years the popularity of systems being widely employed in movie theaters has waxed and waned. Though anaglyph (see next section) was sometimes used prior to 1948, during the early "Golden Era" of 3-D cinematography of the 1950s the polarization system was used for every single feature length movie in the United states, and all but one short film. In the 21st century, polarization 3-D systems have continued to dominate the scene, though during the 60s and 70s some classic films which were converted to anaglyph for theaters not equipped for polarization, and were even shown in 3-D on TV. In the years following the mid 80s, some movies were made with short segments in anaglyph 3D. The following are some of the technical details and methodologies employed in some of the more notable 3-D movie systems that have been developed.
There is increasing emergence of new 3-D viewing systems which do not require the use of special viewing glasses. These systems are referred to as Autostereoscopic displays. They were initially developed by Sharp. The first Autostereoscopic LCD displays first appeared on the Sharp Actius RD3D notebook and the first LCD monitor was shipped by Sharp in 2004 for the professional market.Both have since been discontinued. The first Autostereoscopic mobile phone was launched by Hitachi in 2009 in Japan and in 2010 China mobile is to launch its version. Manufacturing trials are being run for TV. The first digital camera to feature an autostereoscopic display was the Fujifilm FinePix REAL 3D W1 released in 2009. The W3 model was released one year later. For the gaming market the first probable commercial application was handheld gaming devices, such as the Nintendo 3DS. These systems do not yet appear to be applicable to theatrical presentations.