Google is rumored to be working on a pair of heads-up display glasses, which would allow information and text to appear in your immediate visual field. Futuristic! But before you get too excited: READ MORE

Consider this: according to Discogs.com, about 800 remixes were released in 1983. In 1990, more than 4,000; in 2000, almost 15,000. And in 2010, there were 22,750 remixes released, an increase of more than 450% in twenty years. Not surprisingly, as that number has leapt up, remixes also have come to represent a much larger share of what's being released: in 1983, they accounted for 2% of all releases; 7% in 1990; 17% in 2000; until, by 2010, a staggering 20% of all releases were remixes. READ MORE

1. “THE CASE IS CLOSED”

“For general use the single-tone [black-and-white] pictures will enormously prevail." — Rupert Hughes, screenwriter, 1923

“[Sound film] is an exhausted toy, ready to be cast aside.”—David Belasco, playwright, 1930

“Television won't last. It's a flash in the pan.”—Mary Somerville, radio broadcaster, 1948

Roger Ebert knows that 3D movies just don’t work—and they never will. This past January, he wrote: “The notion that we are asked to pay a premium to witness an inferior and inherently brain-confusing image is outrageous. The case is closed.”

As Exhibit A in support of this verdict, Ebert furnished a letter from Walter Murch, the acclaimed editor of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now. Murch has a theory about how 3D films befuddle our eyes and brain, by confounding their natural convergence and focus reflexes: “They are doing something that 600 million years of evolution never prepared them for. This is a deep problem, which no amount of technical tweaking can fix.”

Ebert and Murch aren’t the only ones who find 3D movies unpleasant, unnatural, and generally unfit for human consumption. It’s estimated that 2% to 12% of the population is “stereo blind” to some degree: unable to see fully in three dimensions. This includes people with eye alignment disorders like amblyopia or strabismus (which can sometimes be corrected with therapy), people with certain optic nerve defects and, of course, those with only one functional eye.

And some people with fully working binocular vision nonetheless consider 3D films to be a headache-inducing waste of time and money. Two years after the phenomenal success of Avatar, with a host of rather more shoddily crafted stereoscopic spectacles having come and gone in the interim, there’s talk of a “3D backlash,” and studios are scaling down their plans for new 3D extravaganzas.

But I submit that Ebert is seriously mistaken. I’ve been intrigued by 3D since first picking up a View-Master as a child, and I’ve come to understand it much better in the course of producing my own stereo images over the past couple of years. What I’ve learned about the history of the medium, how it works, why it sometimes doesn’t work, and how it’s currently evolving has convinced me that it’s here to stay.

2. “WE CLASP AN OBJECT WITH OUR EYES”

Stereography—the art and science of creating artificial three-dimensional images—has its roots in the early 19th century. British scientist Charles Wheatstone crucially summarized the theory of stereo vision in a landmark 1838 paper presented to the Royal Society: “[T]he mind perceives an object of three dimensions by means of the two dissimilar pictures projected by it on the two retinæ.”

Meanwhile, across the Channel, Louis Daguerre was developing his eponymous photographic process. Very quickly, these two discoveries were combined to create stereoscopic photography. By the 1850s, David Brewster’s stereo viewing devices—recognizable ancestors of the View-Master—had infiltrated many homes. The public appetite for stereo images was fed by firms like the London Stereoscopic Company; in its first two years of business, it sold over half a million stereoview cards, each bearing a pair of photographs taken simultaneously from adjacent viewpoints.

In an 1859 essay in The Atlantic, Oliver Wendell Holmes described binocular vision in vivid metaphor:

“We see something with the second eye which we did not see with the first; in other words, the two eyes see different pictures of the same thing, for the obvious reason that they look from points two or three inches apart. By means of these two different views of an object, the mind, as it were, feels round it and gets an idea of its solidity. We clasp an object with our eyes, as with our arms, or with our hands, or with our thumb and finger, and then we know it to be something more than a surface.”

Holmes, a great stereoscopy enthusiast, developed his own immensely popular lightweight stereo viewer design. You can still buy or build a Holmes-style stereoscope, but with a little practice, you may be able to “freeview” side-by-side stereo images without any special gear, by letting your eyes drift until the pictures converge.

Old stereo view cards aren’t hard to find; they turn up frequently at flea markets and junk shops. Online, the New York Public Library has over 42,000 stereographs of American subjects in its collection. There are countless vintage 3D images floating around elsewhere on the Internet, including pictures of world landmarks, non-Western cultures and (inevitably) naked ladies.

Victorian stereo views were the virtual reality of their era, but the faded images are something more than that now: for us, they’re a form of time travel. Viewing a 3D portrait of Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain or Charles Dickens taken over a century ago is like looking through a slightly dusty window into a living past.

3. BOOMS AND BUSTS

The first major wave of 3D films were produced almost 90 years ago. At least 13 films using the anaglyph process (which requires glasses with 2 different-colored lenses, usually red and blue) were released between 1922 and 1925.

This was an era of experimentation; filmmakers were also beginning to explore color and sound as ways to add new dimensions to the cinematic experience. But after the success of 1927’s The Jazz Singer, sound won out, and color and 3D were virtually abandoned.

By the early 1950s, color finally began to take hold in Hollywood. A newer 3D process, using different types of polarizing filters for the left and right eye, conveyed stereo images without anaglyph’s color distortions. Studio bosses, worried about their audiences being stolen away by television, saw 3D as a way to kick the theatrical experience up a notch, and perhaps keep more bodies in seats.

The dozens of new 3D features produced during the first half of the decade included popular titles like Bwana Devil, House of Wax and Kiss Me Kate. But the costs of shipping two prints for a 3D feature, instead of one for a conventional film, and the technical complexities of keeping two projectors in sync and in focus (or else inducing audience eyestrain), proved too burdensome for studios, distributors and theaters. The boom ended so abruptly that Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder, shot in 3D, had been downgraded to a 2D release by the time it hit screens in 1954.

The 3D medium lay mostly dormant until the 1970s, when it was used for a string of low-budget porn titles. (First link especially NSFW.) The major studios starting nosing around the technology again at the dawn of the 1980s, as they perceived a new threat emerging: the VCR. But moviegoers had mixed responses to high-profile releases like Jaws 3D and Friday the 13th Part 3. Once again, the expense and hassle of shooting, editing, printing and distributing three-dimensional films didn’t seem worth the modest box office boost. After 1986, no commercial 3D features were produced for the rest of the decade.

Over the course of the '90s, 3D re-emerged within the growing network of large-format IMAX theaters affiliated with museums and theme parks. Unsurprisingly, most of the films produced were nature documentaries or family fare. Shooting and projecting on 70mm film made for better image quality than ever before, and a high degree of technical precision at every stage minimized viewer discomfort. The IMAX 3D trend grew slowly into the 2000s.

By 2007, another 3D wave seemed to be rising. Once again, Hollywood faced disruptive competition from emerging media: HDTV and file-sharing were leading many viewers to skip the theater experience altogether. The industry geared up to give stereography another try, with a new generation of technology that would further simplify and improve the process. Digital projection systems, already being rolled out in theaters, could be configured for perfectly synchronized, sharply focused 3D much more easily than the mechanical projectors of yore.

That year, CGI animators recreated the physical sets and puppets for Tim Burton’s stop-motion animation feature The Nightmare Before Christmas in order to generate a second point of view for each frame of the film. Harry Potter and friends rode their brooms into the third dimension for the first time. And the buzz began to grow about a potentially game-changing 3D epic from James Cameron.

Avatar unspooled in late 2009. Notwithstanding a cliché storyline, its impeccable stereo visuals were a mystical prog rock album cover come to life. By the time it broke all previous box office records, scarcely a month after its release, every producer in Tinseltown was scrambling for a 3D project.

4. MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE

The elaborate processes involved in creating and delivering 3D content are supposed to deliver a more naturalistic viewing experience. The obvious irony is that from start to finish, stereography involves far more artifice than 2D image-making: double camera systems, complex editing and special effects workflows, custom projection equipment and usually some variety of special glasses.

Several different types of 3D imaging technology are in wide use these days. The oldest, dating back to 1853, is anaglyph, characterized by those red and blue (or more rarely, blue and amber) glasses. In the anaglyph process, the picture intended for the left eye is rendered in a color that’s completely absent from the image going to the right eye, and vice versa. Each lens is precisely tinted to let only one of the images through, even when the two images are superimposed on a screen or in a photographic print.

Since it’s color-based, anaglyph tends to garishly distort the hues of full-color subjects. But if the images to be conveyed are black and white, the anaglyph process doesn’t make much difference; each eye will see a monochromatic picture, and the brain can merge them effectively. Anaglyph 3D has enjoyed a DIY renaissance in the Internet era, because it can be created fairly easily with a pair of cameras and some free software, it can be displayed on any computer monitor, and it can be viewed with cheap paper glasses (you can order a free pair here).

There’s now anaglyph 3D content galore on Flickr and YouTube. NASA has even released some remarkable anaglyph images taken on the surface of Mars by paired cameras on its rovers.

But anaglyph glasses are useless in a contemporary movie theater. Polarization has been the preferred 3D theatrical projection system for over half a century (with RealD’s digital version being the current market leader). Polarized 3D was invented by Edwin Land, father of the Polaroid camera, and uses lenses which invisibly align light waves in one of two different directions. Two pictures, each projected in differently-polarized light, are combined on a screen, and the left and right lenses of the appropriate glasses sort the images out for each eye. Polarized 3D requires a special filter on the projector, and a reflective metallic screen, but its accurate color rendition and the low cost of the glasses make it Hollywood’s choice.

The growing market for 3D television sets is dominated by active shutter technology, which displays left-eye and right-eye images in rapid alternation, instead of simultaneously. Viewers wear battery-powered glasses with liquid-crystal lenses, which receive a timing signal from the TV. The left lens goes black when the screen displays the image for the right eye; then the right lens goes black and the left lens become clear just as the left-eye image appears. In theory, this happens so many times each second that it’s imperceptible.

I recently watched the movie Tron: Legacy, and part of a college football game on ESPN’s 3D channel, on an active shutter television, and it all looked pretty good. However, rapid motion or panning sometimes creates a noticeable out-of-synch flickering effect. And you have to have a very big screen (and sit close to it) to experience truly immersive 3D. The glasses are the most cumbersome part of the system: they cost $100 a pair, are much heavier than polarized or anaglyph glasses and must be recharged periodically.

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Sometime between July and September of this year, you may have heard that America’s poor are not really all that poor. Something like this bit of wisdom from Heritage Foundation researcher Robert Rector from July 27, 2011: READ MORE

Pure Digital Technologies, Founded, San Francisco, 2001. READ MORE

The determined forays of hallowed Western faith traditions into the digital-media world rarely produce a non-embarrassing outcome. There are your teen-themed “Bible-zine” translations. There are your evangelical trade shows. There are your media churches. But the recent news that the Catholic Church was launching a quasi-official confession app on the iPhone was something else again—and not just because it got snapped up in the related Maureen Dowd column-generating software. READ MORE

Recently I was talking with Paul Graham, of genius startup incubator Y Combinator, for a story, and, while on a tangent, he made a case to the tablet-adverse folks like me. "The tablet, I believe now it's pretty safe to say, is the next model of computer," he said. "I think twenty years from now, kids will say, 'What's a computer?' And we'll say, 'Oh back before you used an iPad or an Android device for browsing the web, you had to use this thing with a keyboard and a big monitor.'" And I was like, really? (People like me, who use computers for text, find this idea slightly scary.) And he was like, yeah, dummy, basically: "It's still risky! But I'm pretty much ready to call it at this point." He also noted that, of startups he has seen, that "five years ago, everyone was starting a web startup. And now they're all—well, not all—they're starting things that build upon tablets." Believe it. So I've tried to pay particular attention to tablets during this CES. There's a ton of them! And I guess I'd better get used to loving them. Actually they're not so scary!

While we wait for the supposedly iterative iPad 2, there is, for instance, the BlackBerry Playbook. There are tons of tablets coming down the pike in various stripes—the Samsung Galaxy Tab (it should be a Mario Kart competitor with that name, maybe?), for instance—and none of them really feel dominant but what'll happen is that they'll all rise together. And you know what? Even the Apple fanboys like the Playbook, mostly.

And actually? I like its scale, compared to the iPad. What's also happening is we're getting everything in every size: the Samsung Infuse 4G phone is like... almost a tablet? Like a phone-sized tablet?

And the Motorola Xoom, even? Yeah, there's a ton! The HuffPo actually did something useful with a slideshow comparing 11 tablets at the show. Enjoy those pics, some of those you'll never see in the wild, because, what, gosh, hmm.

So in a sense, with all this wild market diversity, I think we can start to see how devices will be devices—phone-tablets, pad-phones, all kinds of things—particularly if we end up with bendable and transparent screens, yes please. And also? They're gonna be so cheap.

As far as everything else, what people love are the smart little things. Like Yorbuds, the world's ugliest and maybe-best in-ear headphones. And? I mean, why didn't this exist already: the iPad game joystick! That is a huge "duh." Possibly you could build it yourself for $3 at the hardware store? But who among us will! Frankly I would also enjoy snow goggles with an HD video camera, because, why not? Totally ludicrous, but rich people need hilarious things too.

Of course, the one thing that gets people of all stripes excited, for whatever reason, is a beautiful TV. People are predictable in this fashion! So it's not surprising to hear things like this:

Well? Yes. Sony can do that from time to time. I mean... yes.

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These days, you can watch TV pretty much anywhere. Be it on your actual TV, on your laptop, on your phone or on a tablet, they've made it pretty easy to entertain yourself wherever you are. But with all that freedom comes responsibility: responsibility to watch TV only when and where is appropriate. Let me help. READ MORE

SERIOUSLY I just DEPOSITED A CHECK INSIDE MY BANK WHILE BEING INSIDE MY OWN HOME, by taking "pictures" of the "check" with my "smart phone" and then suddenly the "money" is "in" the BANK. (Well okay it is "pending," and if they "accept" it then I just get to "destroy" (their word!) the check? (I love to imagine how many lawyers worked on choosing "destroy" so that it would limit liability; "destroy" is so total but note that it does not specify a manner of destruction.)) So now I will never leave the house again, until my next "smart phone" breaks and I have to go buy a new one.