6 Color RGB Laser Primaries Create Better 3D Experiences

This article was originally published on Premium Beat’s blog.

Chances are, the movie you’ve shelled out money to see in the theater is still being projected using a system incorporating traditional Xenon Arc lamps. Soon, those inefficient lamp projectors will be replaced by laser-powered projectors.

Lasers have longer lifetimes and are more efficient, meaning costs will be curbed by implementing them. When dealing with 3D content, it turns out lasers provide some unique advantages as well.

One laser 3D technology uses a six primary system called Laser 6P for short. The system developed by Barco involves using two distinct sets of red, green and blue (RGB) primaries to create the 3D image. To clarify, this is not a system designed to fill out the color gamut of the system to display more of the visual spectrum by adding primaries, although this has been tried and is confusingly also referred to as 6P. Rather, this 3D projection system using lasers has unique, dedicated red, green and blue primaries for each eye.

Lamp vs. Laser-Based Systems

A lamp-based system contains the broadband spectrum of white light. To separate various bands of light, you have to block the color wavelengths you don’t want, in effect subtracting them from the system. This is considered inefficient because it leads to lower brightness overall in the system.

With lasers, you begin with very narrow bands of light that can be selected to produce a desired color, preventing the need to filter inside or in front of the projector. The bands are narrow enough that in 3D systems two sets of RGB primaries can be chosen far enough apart on the spectrum as to virtually eliminate “crosstalk” between the two eyes. This allows the correct primaries to be cleanly transmitted in one eye while locking them out of the other eye. When you put on a pair of 3D glasses, each eye sees only the images intended for that eye.

The Barco Laser3D laser system works by rapidly alternating each eye’s primary set, fusing the image in the viewer’s perception to see the image in 3D. Since we’re dealing with narrow bands of colors set by the lasers, the glasses can be made to pass or block these colors relatively efficiently. The system saves power since the lasers are only on when needed and no power is blocker or wasted. With the added benefit of lasting much longer than traditional lamps, lasers are a dramatic improvement over the old systems.

Read the full article at Premium Beat’s blog.