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NFL's First Broadcast In 3-D, Still Has Work To Do
darkwing_bmf writes "The NFL broadcast a live game to theaters in 3-D for the first time on Thursday night. The technology demonstration was mostly successful but they still have some issues to work out. 'Some scenes clearly captured the benefits of 3-D broadcasts, however, such as an interception by Chargers linebacker Stephen Cooper as players crisscrossed the field, and a long touchdown catch by San Diego's Vincent Jackson with the arc of the ball caught on camera all the way. Viewers were encouraged to text in their reaction to the viewing. One of the first comments, according to the commentators: "More cheerleaders."'"
Imagine that two people hold on to opposite ends of a rope. One moves the rope to send waves down the rope to the other end. That person could shake the rope horizontally to generate horizontally polarised waves, or vertically to generate vertically polarised waves.
If you pass the rope through a slot in a wall the slot will only allow waves which align with the slot. That is how polaroid sun glasses work. They literally have slots in them aligned a certain way.
You can use polarisation to split two signals from a single stream of photons. Horizontal in the left eye, vertical in the right eye for example.
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Isn't this what the XFL tried? Cameras in huddles, helmets, locker rooms, microphones everywhere, etc.
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I see what you did there.
Anyway, to answer the the OPs question here's a simplified example (real physicists, don't hate on me, I'm not going to get into the gory details here).
First, lets think of a wave in the water. It's traveling in one direction (towards the shore) and vibrating in another (up and down from the plane of the water). Light is the same. It travels in one direction (from the theatre screen to your eye), but it can vibrate in two directions: up and down, or left and right (and technically any combination of that like diagonal and such). This is called the polarization: vertical or horizontal.
So what these 3D theaters do is have a special theater screen that preserves polarization (most just randomize it) and they have one image for one eye sent out in vertical polarization and the other sent out in horizontal polarization. Then by using special glasses they can show only one polarization to each eye.
Think of polarized glasses as having little bars in them, if they're aligned up and down only vertical light can squeeze through the bars, the horizontal gets stuck. Likewise the bars can go horizontally and the vertical light gets stuck.
Actually it's the other way, but that's more complicated. If the bars (i.e. molecules aligned such that they conduct electricity) are vertical, the vertical polarized light resonates with the bars and gets dissipated and the horizontal makes it through. But that's just technical matters.
This is also why polarized sun glasses are great for boating and driving. Since most of the time you're looking out at a big horizontal reflector (the water or your car hood or the road), most of the light that's reflected (glare) is horizontally polarized (I won't go into the details why), so the polarized sunglasses are set up to filter out horizontally polarized light which removes glare and you only get the vertical light which is just about everything else.
He seemed comfortable with it.
There was no denigration.
Guess what that makes you.
My eyes look in slightly different directions, so I've never had depth perception. Can't catch a ball, can't do melee combat effectively. I'm told I have a disadvantage only from about six feet away on in, but that's probably far enough out that a 3D TV would be useless at best, and probably an annoyance from seeing double.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
If by 'neatly topples over' you mean 'experiences cranial acceleration sufficient to go from 5 m/s to -2 m/s in something under a 15cm distance', perhaps. Physics doesn't lie, and the pros are going a metric fuckload faster than high school football players do.
Elastic collision or not, his brain was playing ping-pong at 50+ Gs, and that ain't no good for nobody's neural tissue.
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