My initial response to the 3-D revolution hitting our cinemas today was that it was just another money-making gimmick and inevitably would be a failure. If it’s been with us for such a long time, why hasn’t it taken off yet? Most film historians have wisely forgotten the 1960s ‘revolution’ of ‘Smell-o-Vision,’ the bizarre development by film producer Mike Todd Jr. which literally pumped different scents into the cinema via pipes installed in the back of audience’s seats in its attempt to ‘transport the audience to another world through their sense of smell.’ A 2000 Time magazine article listed it as one of the ‘Worst Ideas of All Time.’ Despite my doubts about 3-D, after a painful commute through Fulham traffic resulted in a failed journey across the Atlantic Ocean, I was left with an entire day to research the topic, and came up with the following conclusion: all good revolutions take time.

The first recorded film to be played in 3-D was ‘The Power of Love’ in 1922. It used the same anaglyph technology that has been the staple for most of the century. Dual images in red and green were projected from two separate machines, and overlapped on the screen; to view the effect, audiences were asked to wear glasses with one red and one cyan-tinted eye. These were the grandfather of those clumsy cardboard glasses you may have worn as a child when attending a tacky theme park ride or a rare and cheesy ‘3-D Movie Event.’ The earliest were generally low-grade B-movies, popular but never mainstream, titles like ‘Creature from the Black Lagoon’ (1954) and its sequel ‘Revenge of the Creature in 3-D.’ (1955) There were however some serious filmmakers who saw a future in it. Alfred Hitchcock experimented with the process, projecting in 3-D some scenes from ‘Dial M for Murder,’ (1954) which is considered by many critics to be one of the best uses of the early process. In the early 1960s, ‘Space-Vision 3D’ advanced the process of stereoscopic film, enabling the image to be printed on a single strip of film, so that only one projector was needed. This allowed for more advanced, widescreen films to be made. However the slew of films in the coming decades came in the form of low-budget ‘skin-flicks’ such as ‘The Stewardesses,’ (1971) and Andy Warhol’s ‘Fleshy for Frankenstein’; (1973) when they did become more mainstream, they remained at the extremes of popular genre staples, generally badly made sequels such as ‘Amityville in 3-D’ and ‘Jaws 3-D’ (both 1983) or bizarre, hardly known animated science fiction films such as ‘Starchaser: The Legend of Orin.’ (1985)

Modern day polarization techniques have come a long way. The stereoscopic effect can now be achieved using two different polarized filters, projecting the two images at the same time without the ‘overlap effect.’ The polarized glasses that can be worn for these are much less distracting than the earlier red/cyan models, because of their more subtle nature: they simply feel like looking through lightly tinted sunglasses, instead of being some sort of circus freak. And filmmakers have started to use the technology in a way that compliments their artistic storytelling, rather than just existing to shock or excite the audiences. A recent home viewing of the Tim Burton-produced ‘Coraline’ (2009) convinced me that the technology really could enhance films. The animated feature was filmed entirely in 3-D, developed with stop-motion Computer Generated Imagery, creating an imaginative and beautiful world that had been fully realized in rich 3-D, rather than just a painful gimmick of yesteryear. The meeting of computers and 3-D was as natural as a large popcorn and a medium Coke.

The real test of 3-D’s success will, inevitably, be James Cameron’s ‘Avatar,’ due in cinemas this December. The megalomaniac filmmaker has spent 15 years developing the project, a 3-D science fiction epic, costing nearly $500 million. While pundits in Hollywood may hope for a bombshell failure, one need only look at 1997’s ‘Titanic,’ the similar ill-hopes for Mr Cameron a decade ago, and its still record-breaking $1 billion box office result, and you can be assured that Mr Cameron knows something we don’t. There is one purely financial reason for expanding the process today: 3-D film would dramatically cut down on video piracy – the projected 3-D image cannot simply be recorded on a camcorder as opportunists have done in the past. This may explain why Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson and Cameron have all vouched for the process, Spielberg announcing in 2005 that he was trying to develop a new 3-D technology using plasma screens, that would not require glasses. This would bring 3-D viewing into our homes, just as the box, the VHS, and the DVD came before. Soon not only our action heroes but also our news broadcasters, whether you want Jon Snow and/or Anderson Cooper that close, will be projected into our living rooms. The future, I guess, is now. Long live the revolution.