Video Transcript
(1.4s) Have you ever been to a 3D movie and wondered how it worked or why you had to wear a specific pair of glasses? The answer depends on polarization.
So light coming from the lights in your room or from the sun is called unpolarized. That means it's traveling in all directions. We can use something though called a polarizer to force light to travel in a specific direction. So a polarizer has something called a polarization axis or a transmission axis. You can think of this kind of like a fence post. There's a series of lines or slits, or maybe like vertical blinds. And that means it only allows light to transmit in this direction.
So what I can do is take a second polarizer. And we think about putting these two polarizers in front of each other. When they both have their transmission axis in the same direction, light should continue to pass through. But if I turn one of these, so it's horizontal direction, then no light should pass through because the first polarizer is sending light through it vertically, and the second is only allowing light horizontally. So I'm going to demonstrate this in front of my webcam. This is a polarizer with two polarizers in the same direction, and here is when one is horizontal and one is vertical. So what does this have to do with 3D movies? Well, the glasses that you wear have polarization properties. One where your one eye is horizontal and the other is vertical. And so the movie that's being projected is actually projecting two images, one horizontally polarized and one vertically polarized.
That's why if you take your glasses off, you can see that the movie looks kind of fuzzy. That's because there's two images. And those each come in through your right eye and your left eye, and your brain combines them to see a 3D image. And that's how a 3D movie works. (2.5s)
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