iFusion Pushes 3D To Your Portable Devices

The 3-D push continues. As movie fans know, major players in the film community are trying to make a push towards 3-D pictures as “the way of the future”. Earlier this week Jeffrey Katzenberg addressed the European Cinema Expo to encourage the move to digital theaters so that studios could roll over to 3-D movies by 2009, citing a move against movie piracy as a big reason for the change.

Now it appears portable technology is starting to head the same direction. Startup company Neovision Labs, has developed a way to view 3-D content on portables like cell phones, PDAs, and iPods without a need for special glasses. The technology is called iFusion (patent pending), because everything sounds cooler with that little “i” in front of it.

The company is started by Randal Kleiser and inventor Michael Mehrle as a way of recouping the losses 3-D pictures suffer after their theatrical run is over with. Currently the movies lose their lifespan as their theatrical run ends. Now cell phones and iPods could become a new point of distribution for these films.

Apparently the technology uses some sort of attachment device that fits over the screen, converting 3-D images into a 3-D presentation. It does not convert 2-D images, however. They have to be in a 3-D format, or converted to 3-D like last year’s Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas. In theory, Mehrle’s invention could be used on televisions and computer displays as well, since it is not device-dependent.

Neovision is searching for additional equity to expand their operations. If they can prove this will help the film industry, I think there might be some major players who are willing to help Neovision out. After all, if Katzenberg could actually show his audience the 3-D movies at work, he’s convinced they would convert quicker. This provides a way for him to do that.

Additional information is available at www.neovisionlabs.com.