When sight and sound go out of sync
SO MANY people have bought high-definition TVs that the manufacturers are now looking for a way to boost TV sales all over again. They see 3D as the answer.
Last month’s consumer electronics show in Berlin was knee-deep in 3D. Philips even promised a 3D shaver, which turned out to be a regular shaver with three wobbly heads.
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Panasonic and Sony both made 3D a major ingredient of their press conferences. Panasonic pointed a 3D camera at the company’s bosses and showed the pictures on 50 3D TV sets dotted round the room. This also meant handing out several hundred pairs of the active-shutter glasses that Panasonic’s system relies on. Each pair costs £100, and the event turned decidedly sour at the end as a squad of bouncers went about ensuring – sometimes physically – that no one left with the glasses in their pockets.
Sony avoided this difficulty by projecting 3D images of the speakers onto a huge screen above the podium, using a “passive polarisation” system which only needs inexpensive viewing glasses. But there was a different problem. The complex processing needed to project the 3D video caused the pictures to lag behind the sound – subjecting the audience to the disturbingly unnatural experience of hearing sounds before seeing what had produced them.
It was bad enough when Howard Stringer, Sony’s top boss, was proclaiming the company’s lead in all things electronic, but it got even worse when classical pianist Lang Lang was brought on to perform on a Steinway grand. In the full glory of 3D, Lang Lang was shown apparently drawing notes from the keyboard before hitting the keys.
As the event progressed, members of the audience increasingly took off their special glasses and simply watched the stage, ignoring the high-tech screens. Unaided human vision, it seems, does a job of providing 3D pictures that not even Sony can improve on.
“When Helen Cammack was on a country walk recently, she was surprised to see a notice telling her that “Ducks keep dogs on leads”
Poisoning with healthy ingredients
READER Peter Crashaw was surprised to read the announcement on a packet of Rentokil mouse and rat poison that the product “contains natural whole wheat”.
Peter wonders what the mice and rats are expected to make of this. Will the mummy and daddy rodents take the poison home and say to their children, “Eat up, it’s good for you. It’s made from whole wheat”?
Or are the humans who use the poison supposed to feel good about killing small animals using healthy organic ingredients?
WHEN Richard Greenwood was looking through the “specialist ingredients” for cosmetics, published on the Delta Laboratories website at , he was startled to find “placenta extract” listed. So far so odd – but odder still is the note that this product can be “vegetable or animal”.
“Reproductive technology has obviously advanced far beyond my present knowledge,” Richard comments. Feedback awaits a shlock-horror movie exploring this new science, entitled Vegetable Birth.
IT’S amazing what you can buy online. 51¶ŻÂţ subeditor Sean O’Neill was checking the affiliation of Joan Johnson-Freese of the US Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, who was quoted in a news story (10 July, p 6).
When Sean typed her name into a famous web search engine, Google AdWords immediately made him the following offer: “Buy Joan Johnson-Freese… up to 43 per cent off: Check great offers & save big now!” Sean wonders if Johnson-Freese is aware that she is for sale, and that she has been so heavily marked down.
THANKS to Adrian Smith, who alerts us to a report in the Yorkshire Evening Post wittily headlined “Food for the sole”. It describes , an innovative treatment offered at the Love Your Skin clinic in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, UK.
This involves putting your feet into a tank of water so that hundreds of small carp can nibble away at the dead skin on your ankles and toes, apparently leaving them soft and smooth. What’s more, according to Turkish entrepreneur Uzeyir Islim, who brought the therapy to Wakefield, “The fish have a relaxing enzyme in them which they then pass to you.”
We were tempted to round off this story with a sequence of terrible puns beginning with “we mustn’t carp”, but we decided there’s no plaice for such childishness in 51¶ŻÂţ.
FINALLY, we reported earlier this year that the Irish broadcaster RTE had described a car crash with the words “both vehicles were travelling in opposite directions” (3 April). This reminded Jerry Holt of a friend’s observation, after two planes went overhead, that they were flying “the same distance apart”.
