3-D GLASSES FOR THE NINETIES

Richard Steenblik used a 1910 physics handbook and a vial of Chinese cinnamon
oil to develop a new three-dimensional vision system.

Steenblik was a researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology when he first
noticed that a videogame called Tempest produced very slight three-dimensional
effects. He knew the effects were caused by an imperfection, called chromatic
aberration, in the human eye's lens and by the brain's stubborn conviction that
the color red often comes from nearby objects while blue tends to emanate from
objects farther away.

Steenblik wanted to find a means of enhancing that effect. He reasoned that
bending, or refracting, light through two different liquids would provide the
necessary boost of chromatic aberration. The 1910 physics text he turned up
noted that Chinese cinnamon oil and glycerin would create the opposing
refraction needed.

Finding the glycerin was easy. Locating the cinnamon oil wasn't. When he
eventually found it, he used the oil, the glycerin, and microscope slides to
build a pair of 3-D glasses. They worked well but were heavy and unwieldy. ``Not
only that,'' explains the inventor, ``but cinnamon oil eats everything organic,
including the glue holding the slides together.''

So he turned to binary-optics techniques developed at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. The binary-optics glasses use pieces of holographic
film 4/1000-inch thick that selectively shift the points at which different
colors of light are focused. The technique makes different colors appear to be
at varying distances from the viewer--the basis of the 3-D effect.

Steenblik and partner Frederick Lauter have formed a company called Chromatek to
market, license, and manufacture the technology.