At the beginning of the last decade there was a boom for 3D in films caused at the end of 2009 with the premiere of ‘Avatar’, whose sequel, ‘The Sense of Water’, will be released next December and whose director hopes that this technology will resurface after its rapid decay.
The 3d fever was not satisfied with conquering the majority of high-end televisions sold during the first years of 2010. In early 2011 the glasses-free 3D technology came to the Nintendo 3DS and months later also to the first mobiles with 3D screensbut the 3D mobile adventure fizzled out much faster on mobile than on TV, at least in the West.
2011, the first 3D mobiles with Android arrive
Really the first mobile with 3d screen without glasses that arrived on the market was Sharp Sharp Mova SH251iS released in Japan in 2002, and the first mobile phone with a 3D screen and 3D camera was the Samsung SCH-B710 launched in South Korea in 2007. As we can see on Wikipedia, from 2002 to 2010, Sharp, Hitachi, Samsung and Motorola had launched some models with 3D screen phones in Japan, China and South Korea, but It was not until 2011 that the first mobile phones with a 3D screen arrived in the Westwhich were precisely mobile with Android.
At the end of June 2011, the LG Optimus 3D arrived, the first mobile phone with a 3D screen to arrive in the West. Thanks to the Parallax Barrier technology of its screen, it was capable of showing different images to each eye, managing to add depth to images thus achieving that 3D without glasses. In addition, it also allowed photos and videos in 3D thanks to its double rear camera.
Weeks after going on sale LG Optimus 3Dthe Taiwanese manufacturer HTC It was also launching its first 3D mobile with the global launch of the HTC EVO 3D. HTC’s proposal was the same as LG’s, offering a mobile phone with a 3D screen without glasses and 3d camera. . Those two were the only two 3D mobiles to hit the western market in 2011, being LG the manufacturer that bet the most on 3D technology. Since while HTC settled for just showing the 3D effect in videos and photos, LG also added the 3D effect in some games.
Mobile phones with 3D screens are not well received
The arrival of the LG Optimus 3D Y HTC EVO 3D to the market encountered several problems. The first is that for many users this 3D thing was a fad that had no future in mobile phones, and the second was that mobile phones with 3D screens had thicker and heavier than non-3D versionsand with 3D mode activated, the battery lasted a lot less.
The support of applications and games for 3D screens was practically nil, since the operating system did not support this technology natively, so it was the manufacturers along with their partners who had to implement said compatibility. LG teamed up with Gameloft to offer some 3D games and released a 3D game converter so gamers could get more out of their LG screen.
And the reception by users was not very good. The 3D screens of these mobiles made many users dizzy after playing games or watching videos for a long time. In addition, that you had to look at the mobile completely from the front to enjoy that depth effect.
In 2012 comes the decline of mobile phones with 3D screen
The “3D boom” in mobile only lasted a year. Given the low sales of these first two Android phones with a 3D screen HTC did not launch any new mobile with 3D screen. LG did dare in 2012 to launch a new model, the LG Optimus 3D Max, which had the same 3D screen as the Optimus 3D but had managed to make the mobile thinner in addition to improving the processor and RAM, but this became LG’s latest 3D screen mobile.
In the West, 3D screens on mobile phones have not been well received to date, since since 2012 no major manufacturer has dared to launch another 3D mobile. We have been ten years without seeing a 3D screen on the market. On the other hand, in China and India, mobile phones with this 3D technology had more pull.
The dizziness, the little support and the unnecessaryness of a 3D screen on a mobile sentenced this technology to death on mobile devices, whose adventure only lasted a year, when 3D without glasses was more fashionable. What’s more, interest in 3D had dropped so much that in 2013 Nintendo launched the Nintendo 2DS, the non-3D version of its handheld.
