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IMAX’s absurd attempt to censor Ars

arstechnica.com

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Re: IMAX’s absurd attempt to censor Ars

#71

Post by rev_bird »

acdha wrote: post #40
pervycreeper wrote: post #11

I find it peculiar that they would call this "censorship", especially when the original article's author, Sam Machkovech, has been one of the article writers who has been beating the drum the loudest in favor of censorship in recent months. I guess it's somehow different when it happens to internet bloggers rather than internet comment authors.

Do you have a citation for any of those claims?

First guess was that this was yet another whiny, obtuse reference to something related to the Gamergate persecution complex that grew out of people for SOME REASON objecting to violent threats and doxxing, google search didn't disappoint: http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/05/gamergate-critic-pos... http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/03/that-life-is-over-zoe-...

Re: IMAX’s absurd attempt to censor Ars

#72

Post by Retric »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #68
Retric wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worse than that due to aliasing effects. Remember your rods are not aligned on a strict grid so need more than one pixel per rod. And, the eye contains ~120 million rods, so ignoring motion your already at ~40k x 40k per eye. Assuming you’re not moving they screen around to follow they eye or projecting on the retina 'resolution' would cap out at around 10 billion - 1 trillion pixels per eye. However, clearly yo…

Confused: Sqrt(120M) is around 11000. Where did 40K come from?

Aliasing effects as you don't get 1:1 pixel per rod alignment. Currently we use 16xAA and Sqrt(16) = 4. So, 11,000 * 4 ~= 40K. Though the density is not constant over the eye so that's probably low balling it a little bit.

Re: IMAX’s absurd attempt to censor Ars

#73

Post by Someone1234 »

dpark wrote: post #62
Someone1234 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like with #1 how you start with the word "no" but then repeat back to me what I said. So we both agree, you need a higher resolution than we have today to clone IMAX in VR, and we won't get that unless VR takes off (as funding is needed to produce the screens). VR also has the weight X factor, how heavy is this prototype 2000 PPI screen? And much would one cost? Both we agree on #1, we both said the same thing. > I…

He didn't repeat back what you said at all. You said this: > "But the "further" away you project the virtual movie screen, the higher the resolution of the VR headset needs to be to support it." He's saying that's not true. He's also right. The resolution the physical VR screens need is completely unrelated to "how far" you project the virtual screen.

As things get smaller a greater PPI is needed to render the same level of detail. You don't mind losing detail, sure, you can keep the resolution the same and keep making it smaller and smaller (distance and size are one in the same in this scenario).

It ultimately boils down to "when detail gets smaller than a single pixel, it is lost." So the smaller the pixel the more detail you can render.

To be honest if you're watching non-HD resolution content, current generation VR headsets at the high end might be able to project it across the room and maintain detail. But HD? S-HD? IMAX? Meh, we aren't there yet.

And I agree with another comment that there is a "cap" on PPI. Once you reach it the human eye becomes the limitation, not the screen(s).

Re: IMAX’s absurd attempt to censor Ars

#74

Post by dpark »

Someone1234 wrote: post #67
tgb wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you said it depends on virtual screen distance, mubard said it depends on solid angle. Mubard is correct and more relevant to the idea of "make the virtual screen larger and further away" which has an implied constraint where the solid angle is kept constant. No one would argue that the coming gen vr devices are at the pixels per degree of IMAX, that's just wrong. Edit: why are so many comments (particularly top…

> No, you said it depends on virtual screen distance, mubard said it depends on solid angle. No, I said it cannot do virtual screen rendering at lower resolutions. mubard agreed. The virtual screen would look terrible as you pulled back if the resolution wasn't high enough to support it (which I don't believe it is, yet).

It has nothing to do with "pulling back" the screen. If the physical display resolution is not high enough, the virtual screen will look terrible regardless of how "close" it is. Even if you were trying to show the pixels on the virtual screen by rendering it very "close", it would still look terrible, because the physical pixels would have insufficient resolution to render the virtual pixels uniquely and clearly.

Re: IMAX’s absurd attempt to censor Ars

#75

Post by murbard2 »

Someone1234 wrote: post #67
tgb wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you said it depends on virtual screen distance, mubard said it depends on solid angle. Mubard is correct and more relevant to the idea of "make the virtual screen larger and further away" which has an implied constraint where the solid angle is kept constant. No one would argue that the coming gen vr devices are at the pixels per degree of IMAX, that's just wrong. Edit: why are so many comments (particularly top…

> No, you said it depends on virtual screen distance, mubard said it depends on solid angle. No, I said it cannot do virtual screen rendering at lower resolutions. mubard agreed. The virtual screen would look terrible as you pulled back if the resolution wasn't high enough to support it (which I don't believe it is, yet).

No you said:

"But the "further" away you project the virtual movie screen, the higher the resolution of the VR headset"

That is wrong, plain and simple. How far the movie screen appears in the VR headset has no impact whatsoever on pixelization and is purely a stereoscopic effect.

Re: IMAX’s absurd attempt to censor Ars

#76

Post by Bud »

waterlesscloud wrote: post #5
teddyh wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. It wasn’t a description of IMAX, it was a description of something else by comparing it with IMAX. It was not describing IMAX. 2. It was someone else who was describing something and likened this other thing to IMAX. Ars was quoting this person, not writing it themselves. Don’t drag out the “ confusion with consumers ” thing – absolutely no-one would think that this thing actually was an IMAX™ – it was a compariso…

The point, of course, isn't that they would think it was literally an IMAX. I'm not sure why you're arguing against that, frankly. But that consumers could think it was IMAX certified or some such. That sort of thing is worth defending.

Consumers could also think it was certified by the Mayo Clinic and made of unicorns. This is approximately as likely.

Making the leap from what was written in the article to "IMAX certified" is a hilariously wide leap. It's about two orders of magnitude too wide to justify the threat letter from IMAX.

Re: IMAX’s absurd attempt to censor Ars

#77

Post by 7Z7 »

MCRed wrote: post #48
insipid wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even presuming we accept "trademark erosion" as a thing, it's still irrelevant here: the author wasn't using a trademark to describe a generic good (i.e., they didn't mean "a 'large-format' movie theatre with surround sound"), they were literally referring to the product (or, rather, one of the confusingly different products) traded under the "IMAX" mark (i.e., they meant, literally, AN IMAX THEATRE).

Both parties are guilty here. Ars should put at the bottom of its article "IMAX is a trademark of " which acknowledges the IMAX trademark. And IMAX's lawyers should be less obtuse in their writing when there's such a simple solution. Also, the law shouldn't be that trivial uses of the mark like this work to erode it, but the law is not precise on the issue so mark holders tend to have to be verzealous in showing thei…

>Both parties are guilty here. Ars should put at the bottom of its article "IMAX is a trademark of " which acknowledges the IMAX trademark.

No, this is absolute bunk. There is no reason for this. At least in the US this is protected by Nominative Use, which guarantees that "a person may use the trademark of another as a reference to describe the other product, or to compare it to their own."

Further: "Nominative use does not require that ownership of the trademark be acknowledged, for example by use of a sentence such as "UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group"."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_use

Re: IMAX’s absurd attempt to censor Ars

#78

Post by dpark »

Someone1234 wrote: post #73
dpark wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He didn't repeat back what you said at all. You said this: > "But the "further" away you project the virtual movie screen, the higher the resolution of the VR headset needs to be to support it." He's saying that's not true. He's also right. The resolution the physical VR screens need is completely unrelated to "how far" you project the virtual screen.

As things get smaller a greater PPI is needed to render the same level of detail. You don't mind losing detail, sure, you can keep the resolution the same and keep making it smaller and smaller (distance and size are one in the same in this scenario). It ultimately boils down to "when detail gets smaller than a single pixel, it is lost." So the smaller the pixel the more detail you can render. To be honest if you're…

> As things get smaller a greater PPI is needed to render the same level of detail.

It really doesn't work that way. If your VR display is too low-resolution to convincingly render a virtual display 15 feet away, then it's too low-resolution to convincingly render the virtual display 15 inches away. Your physical display has the same resolution regardless of where the virtual screen is, and if it lacks sufficient resolution to render an object convincingly, it just cannot do it regardless of how distantly the object is rendered. To put it another way, your display has the ability to render a certain amount of detail, full stop. Where a virtual object is rendered is irrelevant.

Try this. Sit close to your monitor, close enough that text isn't crisp enough. Now zoom your display (Ctrl+'+' in most browsers), which is equivalent to bringing a virtual display closer. Note that the text still isn't crisp. If you could see the pixelation before, you can still see it. Moving the virtual display closer does nothing, because you aren't adding more resolution to the physical display.

Re: IMAX’s absurd attempt to censor Ars

#80

Post by chinpokomon »

nogridbag wrote: post #43
shiggerino wrote: post #22

I went to an IMAX™®℠℗(U.S. Patent 3,494,524) theatre once. Having to recline and look up at the screen was annoying, and the size was gratuitous with most of it wasted to peripheral vision. That's definitely not something I'd want in my living room.

A proper large format 15/70 IMAX theater is definitely worth it given you arrive early to get the better seats - especially for 3D films where the 3D glasses tend to make the screen look smaller. Sadly, the IMAX CEO says screen size does not matter [1] and thus the majority of them are being replaced by smaller digital screens in multiplexes. lfexaminer.com has a great list of IMAX theaters and their formats [2]. [1]…

Regarding the 3D experience, Real3D's circular polarization is significantly better than IMAX's more traditional polarization filters. The large screen format serves well for immersion, but the employed 3D tech detracts from the overall experience so much that I'd rather watch the smaller format screens.
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