Daylight Movies.

Pelorus Guardian and Miners' Advocate., Volume 29, Issue 37, 15 May 1917, Page 2

Daylight Movies.

A CINEMA SCREEN THAT DOBS NOT NEED DARKNESS.

According to the latest statistics, nearly 16,000,000 people frequent daily the “movie” shows in the United States. And there are fully 18/000 of these showpieces in operation. Darkness is essential to successful display, and this needful gloom has been abused more or less seriously. To avoid these consequences the laws of some States require that the picture theatres be illumined every fifteen minutes during the show. The reels are highly inflammable, and panics occasioned by their conflagration have more than once caused grave loss of life. But now, thanks to the successful development of a satisfactory translucent screen, it (says the “Scientific American”) is not only possible to greatly lessen the hazards incident to a darkened showplace of this sort, but daylight movies are practicable. In other words, with the screen invented and developed by John F. R. Troeger, pictures can be projected without the usual enveloping gloom. The hall can be fully illuminated. Instead of placing the projecting lantern in the theatre and among the spectators, the translucent screen makes it feasible to locate this apparatus back of the theatre and in a fireproof single opening in the intervening wall sufficing for the projecting rays to reach the screen in front of it. Should anything go wrong with the lantern, there would be nothing to alarm the audience. This fireproof screen, because the light rays pass on directly to the spectators, and because of the nearness of the projector to the screen, permits of a very high illumination of the image, contrary to the usual white screen and the more remote lantern. Further, because the surrounding . atmosphere is lighted up the eyes are not taxed by the contrast between the ordinary darkened hall and the more or less dazzling white screen. Besides this, the spectator gets a more realistic picture and one with but little distortion, no matter where he may sit in the house. This is due to the texture of the surface of the Troeger screen.

The .front of this screen is marked vertically by very fine ribs or prisms and these serve to show the picture with but little lateral foreshortening, even when the point of view is well ofi to right or left. The pictures, besides, are truer to nature than the photographs on the films. That is to say, they have more depth and are not marked by that “flatness so common to most motion picture displays. The camera is a one-eyed instrument, and two eyes are necessary to get the double image which produces the sense of depth. The projecting apparatus ordinarily simply reproduces the flat photograph. But the ribs on the Troeger screen give our two eyes the duplex images we are accustomed to, and thus we get the so-called stereoscopic effect which nature intends we shall have when viewing any object that has form and not For educational purposes a translucent screen of this / character is much to be desired, because it permits the lecturer to see his audience and thus to promote sympathy. At the same time, the spectator’s attention is apt to be far more constant, and there is less likelihood of the eyes being tired or of a hypnotic effect induced by glare.