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Why 3D doesn't work and never will.

blogs.suntimes.com

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Re: Why 3D doesn't work and never will.

#51

Post by Retric »

shasta wrote: post #43

Doesn't this assume you don't know the focal plane? If you know what the viewer is focusing on, you can compensate. This means that without any holographic projection techniques, you could fully solve this problem by presenting each viewer with images customized to his detected focus. That might require an expensive headset today, which radically changes the economics of 3D movies, but it doesn't require a breakthrou…

Not a bad idea. You could do it with one person in the theater, but you can take it one step further.

Have a camera facing the eye that can tell what the person is focusing on. (High end video cameras already have this.)

Have an adaptive lense in the glasses to vary rapidly change the focal plane from where they eye things it is to the screen. You then build software that blurs the image outside of their focal plane. Granted there are limits on this aproach, but people get used to glasses that have a fixed shift in the focal plain fairly quickly so it should be possible.

Now I don't see how you could extrapilate that to a theater full of people, but you can build a system that works for 1 person.

Re: Why 3D doesn't work and never will.

#52

Post by gnaffle »

RyanMcGreal wrote: post #24

My problem with 3D is simply that I find I can't disappear into the movie. I'm steadily aware of myself sitting and watching the 3D effects, which ruins the experience.

I had this feeling with some poorly made 3D movies. But I only occasionally had that feeling while watching Avatar.

Re: Why 3D doesn't work and never will.

#53

Post by mhb »

So the claim (which sounds reasonable) is that there is a mismatch between the plane on which each eye is focused and the convergence angle between the eyes and we are unaccustomed to this in real life.

Why doesn't this also cause discomfort in a conventional 2D movie in which the focal plane and the convergence angle stay the same (both at the screen plane) but our brains expect the convergence angle to change as items from different distances in the movie image come into focus in the movie?

Re: Why 3D doesn't work and never will.

#54

Post by baggachipz »

marknutter wrote: post #11

As much as I hate the recent spate of 3D movies, I don't think it has anything to do with the technology, but more about how poorly it is applied. I say this because Avatar, at least for me, was simply mind-blowing; it was easily the most immersive film I've ever watched, but mainly because the 3D was done tastefully, subtly, and with care. You can give me as much hand-waving sudo-science to try to convince me I'm no…

"I don't believe your research."

$> sudo science

"I believe you now."

Re: Why 3D doesn't work and never will.

#55

Post by GrandMasterBirt »

brudgers wrote: post #42
krschultz wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that Clarke was referring to technology problems. I agree that with enough time, will, research, money etc many technical problems can be solved that were thought impossible. But constraints of human beings don't change much. If our brains are not wired to really get the current 3D format, then I think that is a pretty good indictment of the technology. The post isn't saying 3D movies won't exist someday, it i…

It's not just the viewers mind, it's the film editor's as well. Murch says, "Consequently, the editing of 3D films cannot be as rapid as for 2D films, because of this shifting of convergence." OK, so 3d films have to be edited differently - since when have constraints been an issue in art? But more importantly, the 600 million years of evolution argument doesn't hold the water he is putting in it. 600 million years o…

Except there are studies coming out about the harm to developing eyes and such. The point is that we're not meant for 3D. 3D though is a great way theaters try to "add value" to movies forcing us to pay more. Tangled was playing ONLY in 3D in theaters around me xept for like 1 showing. Guess which is the only showing I could take my daughter to. She would throw the glasses off in 15 minutes due to headache an thats the end of the movie for her. Was that worth an extra 10 bucks a ticket?

Like any new tech, makers want to convince us this tech is the way to go. So study more, and give us the old school alternatives.

Re: Why 3D doesn't work and never will.

#56

Post by Splines »

cryptoz wrote: post #47
axod wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely 3d only makes any sense if you can move around the environment - a holo-deck. 3d movies, where we're all sat down in a fixed chair makes absolutely no sense. It's a gimmick that adds nothing - apart from headaches, crappy dark image and occasional crude "THIS IS 3D" in your face 'effects'. Sitting in a chair looking at a screen we already see 3D. We have all the cues necessary for our brains to reconstruct the…

> didn't work in 2010s Hah! You wish. For example, Avatar made more than $2,000,000,000 . That's $2 billion . And a huge part of the Avatar revenue comes from its 3D sales. Maybe it didn't work for you , but it sure worked for most people who went to see it.

But given a choice, would moviegoers pick the 2D version over the 3D version?

In a universe where Avatar 3D never existed, would the 2D version alone have sold as much? Remember, they would have also been able to deliver the movie earlier (I don't know how much, but making a 3D movie can't be free - at least not yet).

I'm reasonably certain that there are only a very small number of people who saw Avatar for the sole reason of it being 3D (in other words, if the 2D version was the only option, they would have skipped it).

Re: Why 3D doesn't work and never will.

#57

Post by scottbessler »

henrikschroder wrote: post #38
zyb09 wrote: post #21

Don't know, everybody seems to bash 3D these days. When I watched Avatar I thought it was pretty awesome and didn't get any headaches either. Maybe it's no good having a 3D TV at home and expose ourselves constantly to fake 3D every day, but watching a movie every now and then in the cinema can't be that bad. Edit: Also, all these people are just speculating, there's no science backing up any pro or anti 3D claims. I…

Did you even read the article? He's not speculating, he's talking about how human vision works, and how the current 3D technology is more difficult for us humans to process, and he's talking about how the current 3D technology places limitations on the cinematography that 2D movies don't suffer from. Those are big obstacles that make current 3D movies a worse experience. Whether the 3D itself makes up for it is subje…

No offense to sound engineers, but Murch is not the foremost authority on the brain, the eyes, and whatever else goes into our processing of 3D. Further he hasn't offered any sort of proof, merely conjecture about why he thinks 3D should get off his lawn.

Sure, the current technology has some weaknesses, but as others have said, many found it awfully compelling in Avatar (many good reviews, and $2B in revenue).

Re: Why 3D doesn't work and never will.

#58

Post by narag »

axod wrote: post #45
gjm11 wrote: post #8

My own prejudices go along with this completely, but ... (Arthur C) Clarke's First Law: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; when he states that something is impossible, he is probably wrong." ... has turned out to be correct often enough that I wouldn't want to place large bets on this. (Digression: there's an obvious difficulty in assessing Cla…

Surely 3d only makes any sense if you can move around the environment - a holo-deck. 3d movies, where we're all sat down in a fixed chair makes absolutely no sense. It's a gimmick that adds nothing - apart from headaches, crappy dark image and occasional crude "THIS IS 3D" in your face 'effects'. Sitting in a chair looking at a screen we already see 3D. We have all the cues necessary for our brains to reconstruct the…

I happen to dislike the idea of most films and (horror!) tv and games using 3D, and at the same time I enjoyed 3D Avatar like a child.

About the "small" thing, I sat at the 4th row (?) and the image was fine.

Re: Why 3D doesn't work and never will.

#59

Post by alttab »

marknutter wrote: post #11

As much as I hate the recent spate of 3D movies, I don't think it has anything to do with the technology, but more about how poorly it is applied. I say this because Avatar, at least for me, was simply mind-blowing; it was easily the most immersive film I've ever watched, but mainly because the 3D was done tastefully, subtly, and with care. You can give me as much hand-waving sudo-science to try to convince me I'm no…

Nothing like an un-biased view of how "3D" will never work from a guy who has built his career off of making sound-systems.

Re: Why 3D doesn't work and never will.

#60

Post by shasta »

Retric wrote: post #51
shasta wrote: post #43

Doesn't this assume you don't know the focal plane? If you know what the viewer is focusing on, you can compensate. This means that without any holographic projection techniques, you could fully solve this problem by presenting each viewer with images customized to his detected focus. That might require an expensive headset today, which radically changes the economics of 3D movies, but it doesn't require a breakthrou…

Not a bad idea. You could do it with one person in the theater, but you can take it one step further. Have a camera facing the eye that can tell what the person is focusing on. (High end video cameras already have this.) Have an adaptive lense in the glasses to vary rapidly change the focal plane from where they eye things it is to the screen. You then build software that blurs the image outside of their focal plane.…

> Have a camera facing the eye that can tell what the person is focusing on.

Sorry I was a bit terse, but that's what I meant by "detected focus."

> You then build software that blurs the image outside of their focal plane.

That's not it exactly. The problem you're trying to solve is that, when the viewer is focused at one depth but is viewing a flat image at another depth, it will already appear blurry to him. You can't fix that with extra blurring. The fix is to distort the original image, much like corrective lenses.

And BTW, I suspect that you can't perform this correction for even a single viewer in the audience unless you're tracking his location and orientation.

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