Since beginning of movies, the pioneers of cinema tried to make those flat 2-D images on the screen jump out at the audience. With Journey to the Center of the Earth - the first live action feature film shot in digital 3-D - coming out this week, lets look back at great past moments in 3-D.

Photo by Thinkstock/CorbisThe Early Years
3-D film that we have come to know and love soon followed. Early cinematic pioneers Edwin S. Porter and William E. Waddell developed anaglyph 3-D technology in 1915, which used those familiar two-color lenses. In the 1930s, Edwin H. Land created 3-D with polarized filters, using spectacles that looked like sunglasses. That brand of 3-D, though, wouldnt be widely used for another fifty years.

Everett CollectionThe Golden Age of 3-D
When the first 3-D feature, "Bwana Devil," hit box office pay dirt in 1952, Hollywood studios took notice. Soon scores of 3-D flicks were being made, the most successful being Vincent Price's House of Wax. By 1960, though, the 3-D boom had completely gone bust. The fad ended so quickly that Alfred Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder, which was filmed in 3-D, was never shown in theaters that way.

Everett CollectionDecline
3-D in '50s needed two projectors running simultaneously, making them costly and troublesome to screen; theaters needed two projectionists and the films sound and image kept falling out of synch. But by the '70s, filmmakers developed 3-D film that needed only one projector. By then, though, 3-D was mostly found in exploitation flicks -- the most notable being Andy Warhol's Frankenstein.

Everett CollectionResurrection
With box office revenues falling thanks to that newfangled invention, the VCR, studios tried to resurrect 3-D cinema. Attempts were made to revitalize failing franchises by giving them the 3-D treatment, with flicks like Friday the 13th Part III in 3-D, Amityville 3-D, and Jaws 3-D. But, like the 50s boom, the spectacle of three dimensions couldnt disguise the fact that the movies were awful, and the craze died again.

Photo by IMAX Pictures, Everett CollectionIMAX 3-D
Following its debut at Expo 86 in Vancouver, IMAX 3-D format movies popped up in theme parks and science museums around the world, stunning audiences with overwhelmingly huge images of underwater sea creatures, spaceships in flight, and computer-animated dinosaurs. Because they were insanely expensive to produce, though, most of these films topped out at 40 minutes or so.

Photo by Walt Disney, Everett CollectionIMAX 3-D Gets Big(ger)
In 2003, James Cameron returned to the watery wreckage of the Titanic to make Ghost of the Abyss, a 3-D documentary shot on high-def video using technology built specifically for that movie. The next year, The Polar Express became the first animated feature to be released in IMAX 3-D. Another huge development occurred when it became possible to digitally create a 3-D effect in films that were shot in 2-D. Superman Returns and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix had certain scenes converted into 3-D, but it is still too time consuming to adapt an entire film.

Photo by Walt DisneyRealD
To make things more complicated, Disney released Chicken Little in RealD. Unlike IMAX, RealD is projected digitally at a frame rate triple that of normal films. The film was a hit, especially on its RealD screens, and soon more computer animated RealD movies followed, including Monster House, Meet the Robinsons, and Beowulf. The first two live action films to be released in this format were concert documentaries, U2 3D and the hugely successful Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: The Best of Both Worlds.

Photo by Eric Charbonneau, WireImageThe Future
The studios are dumping pots of money into 3-D development so expect to wear more plastic glasses at the theater. That is until Steven Spielberg debuts the technology hes reportedly working on glasses-free 3-D which uses plasma screens. Rumors also abound about James Camerons next movie, Avatar. People say that it will revolutionize 3-D and computer graphics, though at this point only a handful of people have actually seen any footage. Is it the next evolutionary step in movies or hype? Stay tuned and find out.