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The Future of Cinema - 'Real' 3D
GunSlinger writes "The IGN movies site is running a story on an old movie concept seeing a resurgence. 3D movies are making a cinematic comeback via new, more sophisticated techniques. Yes, you still wear glasses. No you don't get a headache. Yes, the effect is fantastic. This story looks at the technology, past and future projects, and why just about every major studio is now planning in three dimensions. 'There is indeed a revolution in cinema taking place. It's quietly slipped under the radar of most technophiles, beginning its assault on the way we consume media clothed in thoroughly unassuming garb -- the Disney Digital 3-D film, Meet the Robinsons ... no, we don't blame you for being skeptical. Most people in their mid-20s or later think of 3-D movies from the old school perspective -- goofy red and blue coloured glasses, strained eyes, possible migraines. And most importantly, a so-so 3-D effect. No more.'"
3D is boring...
When is it going to plug directly in to my head already?
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cause as soon as you move it, the scene will fail to change and the illusion is lost.
Call me when you can give me 3d that I can walk around.. aka white light holograms.
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3D cinema will never be accepted while you need to wear those cheap paper glasses. It will always be a gimmick. It doesn't matter if a major studio releases a children's school-holidays blockbuster in 3D - in fact that just makes it more gimmicky.
Wake me up when a 3D film wins an Oscar for Best Picture.
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One of the problem with 3D cinema is that it sometimes provides counter-intuitive cues to the viewer. When you see a 2D film, there is nothing in the film telling you the size of the objects. Large objects may be large because they are close to you, and small objects may be small because they are far away. You don't break suspension of disbelief when an actors face covers half the screen, because it's similar to standing close to a person.
When 3D is added, all this breaks down. An actor in close up suddenly becomes a giant. Everything changes size radically from shot to shot.
3D might be great for large vistas, but if you just insert 3D into a normal film, then you detract much from the visual language of film that we've gotten used to, as many of the shots become so disturbing.
Another drawback with 3D is that your eyes will attempt to focus at out of focus areas because the depth cues are there, but of course the focus is fixed
and cannot be changed and fatigue is the result. In a 3D generated film, it's possible to keep everything in focus at the same time, but for live action this is simply not practical.
A witty
I saw Meet the Robinsons in 3D the other week.
Shoddy glasses?
The glasses were not paper/cardboard. They looked like plastic sunglasses.
Already wearing glasses?
I wear corrective glasses and the 3d glasses fit fine over them.
Can't move your head?
No, you don't have to keep your head still. You can turn your head without bluring or motion sickness.
The 3d effect is stunning. This is miles beyond the old cardboard red/blue glasses.
--McVerne
Or at least that is how all of this talk about 3D sounds like to me... The industry feels like it needs something to bring people back into the movie house. Lets see, good movies at lower prices or 3D with the same crap movies and high prices. Guess which one they would like you to chose.
If it's the same technology as they used in Superman Returns during the IMAX showings (and according to the little featurette video in page 2 of TFA, it seems like it is), then yes. I wear glasses myself. When I went in to the IMAX theatre, the workers handed me a pair of plastic glasses that did not look very sanitary. I tried wiping them off, but the lenses were still kinda grimy. So what ended up happening was that I had to watch the movie with two pairs of glasses on, and since I wasn't sitting in the middle, the 3D effect was "off". Not to mention the disgusting crap on the glasses. And that talk about not having a headache? Well ... I guess so. But I felt like my eyes were starting to cross involuntarily, and they felt more strained when I watched a 20-second stretch of 3D than when I spend 3+ hours sitting in front of a monitor.
All in all, it was a terrible experience. The "3D" effect was marginally better than the old red/blue method at best, and completely ineffective at worst. My eyes felt like they were about to pop out. I'll never watch another movie with that technology again.
The Amiga, long before any other desktop system, had a 3D system using LCD shutters sync'd to the interlaced video fields (interlaced video was one of the display options in the Amiga chip set), so your eyes saw different images, which your brain understood as 3D. With digital theaters, improvements in LCD tech', synchronization by RF, IR, or whatever it takes to trigger the tiny processor controlling the shutters (could be a component of the screen image), so there are no wires to the glasses, 3D is trivial to present. Takes a bit of compute power to produce, but still commercially viable.
Only two real problems:
digital movies are at pathetic resolutions, and 3D won't be better, so I don't go to theaters that use them.
theaters are full of stupid and/or inconsiderate people continually distracting me from the movies, and the theater owners/managers won't do anything about it, so I don't go to theaters.
Oh, and the movies are almost all terrible, anyway, but for a couple of bucks to watch at home, it doesn't bother me so much.
Problem with this tech is that it is STILL stereo graphic. It's not volumetric, and therefore, the old eye strain problems will still exist.
OK, these guys may have developed a better way to deliver and display a stereo graphic image, but in the end, it's the same old crap we've seen for decades. You're still wearing stereo glasses. You put some glasses on, your right eye sees one image, your left eye sees another image, your brain converges the two images, but you can't focus on the depth of your choosing. Focus is predetermined by the film.
Human stereoscopic vision relies upon two mechanisms, convergence and accommodation. This cinema tech doesn't account for the latter. With this tech you still can't focus on depths of your choosing... as you would with a volumetric image or a real 3D object in the real world. These guys are trying to skirt around accommodation by limiting shots to particular ranges of depth. While this may help to minimize the problem, it doesn't eliminate it.
All in all... move along, nothing new to see here.
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The article is a little vague about how it works, trying to make it sound more magical.
What the system does is alternate projections of the left and right eye images using the same DLP projector. They said 144 frames per second, which I think means that each film frame (of which there are 24 per second) is projected 3 times for each eye, this means each eye sees the image flickering at 72 times a second, which is above the threshold for most people to see flickering. The real technology is a special lcd screen that is put in front of the lens of the projector that changes it's polarization 144 times per second so each image is polarized differently.
The real advantage of this is that the same DLP projector used for non-3D films can be reused, just put the lcd in front of the lens when showing 3D. Any other system would require a second projector, which not only adds the cost of the projector, but the cost to mount it and add another aperture in the theatre wall. (actually another system would be shutter glasses with lcd lenses that turn on/off so each eye sees one side, but handing each customer an item that costs 10 or more dollars is probably out of the question) Also this system allows perfect alignment so that things that should appear at the screen plane really appear there, and high-contrast things like the credits can be projected at that distance with no ghosting.
It does appear fortunate that they can run at 144 frames per second, though if they were like consumer ones with a maximum of 90 or 100 it would still be an acceptable flicker rate of 45 or 50 (classic film projectors flickered 48 times a second due to having 1 extra vane on the shutter).
That's the first thing that came to my mind when I saw the headline.
They are hoping it will be somehow harder to copy 3D movies. It's not. So if that's the motivation behind this push then they can forget it.
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If I have to take off my glasses, the movie will just be a blur. But it will be a 3D blur!
Chris Mattern
The point isn't that polarization for 3-D project was just invented. The point is that a few particularly filmmakers and studios are keenly interested in it at the moment and have refined the technology further than it's ever gone before. Many of the problems with perspective and motion not being quite right before have been solved. The visors and the reflective screens are better than before. 3-D movies might actually be a substantial improvement now instead of a mere gimmick.
The real test may be James Cameron's Avatar, which goes into production soon. Cameron has overseen the development of completely new digital cameras for shooting in 3-D, and he plans to take advantage of the format's superior frame rate as well; we're talking about sci-fi action in 60 fps or more.
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IMax has two different systems for 3D effects.
The first is the polarized glasses, this is used for films that have not been filmed in 3D but they then process and setup multiple projectors to give a 3D look. They glasses look like sun glasses but and from my limited experience they just barly fit over the glasses of existing wearers. This is the kind of technology the article is refering to.
Then you have the full Imax 3D with just plainly rocks!!!! It consists of a full head gear which fits over your head and easily over existing glasses, it comes with built in speakers to add to the theater sound and uses signals from the projector to flip the lens to give the 3D illusion. If you have not seen one of theses they are a must see. Even the dopey films are impressive just for the 3D effects. My personal favorite is the _Deep Sea_ it is really funny to lift the head sets and see people attempt to grab the fish as they swim up to them.
Its been around for years ... I believe they call it "theatre" or something.
This "circular" polarization only solves problem with head tilting.
Another factor which is order of magnitude more important in depth perception is the parallax effect : When you move the coordinates of the point of view (be it because you made a step on one side OR because you slightly turned you head and your eyes aren't at the same position down to the milimeter), the object that are neerer in your field of view appear to "move" much more than those that are farther away.
It's how the sensation of "depth" is done in games using 2D displays (either using several scrolling layers in older games, or using 3D polygons on more recent FPS. As a example of parallax effect, the wobbling of the ship in the Descent series helps illustrating the depth of the labyrinth on-screen). The depth perception is VERY sensitive to small parallax effects linked to slight head motion.
This CAN be done with head mounted displays (HMD) equiped with accelerometers (any slight motion of the head is translated into microscopic camera motion in the game world).
This CAN be somewhat done with rotation/projection systems that can be shown as 3D from any angles (if the subject moves he'll see different reflections on the rotating target corresponding to different angle).
This could be somewhat done with shutter glass, provided enough head tracking.
This is circumvented with historical stereo 3D as from the Lumière era (where the eyes are kept fixed against the binocular aperture and thus there's no motion to provoke parallax effect. BUT you lose the depth information you could get from it).
This CAN'T be done with traditional 3D cinema (because there are only 2 different image projected on the screen, they don't change as the head moves).
This CAN'T be done with current stereographic LCD pannels (when in stereomode, only 2 image are projected) unless separate head tracking is used, but it'll only work for the user holding the accelerometer, not the other viewers.
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I'm going to assume you've never seen the non-red/blue glasses at work. While the very vocal people on here are complaining about how the polarized glasses gave them headaches, most people had no issue with them at all. I certainly never did, and I saw Captain EO, that stupid Kodak thing, and Honey I Shrunk the Audience dozens of times. (Gotta love living in Florida.)
Each eye sees a different image on the screen. If you close one eye, it's just like closing 1 eye in real life. You get that image only. The glasses themselves are like polarized sunshades. I doubt it's the actual polarization that bothers those that get headaches, but is instead the framerate of the picture since it's effectively cut in half. (15 fps per eye, instead of 30.) The strobe effect could be quite annoying.
If you take off the glasses, you end up with a watchable but odd-looking image where things that are supposed to be very close or very far are fuzzy. Since most action is in the middle anyhow, it's not that bad.
These new glasses won't work on exactly the same technique, so they'll look a little different, but the effect when you take off the glasses with probably be about the same. Same for the effect with 1 eye closed, also.
In the end, I think you'll find the glasses don't make it much different from a real scene.
If they start 'shooting in 3d only', you'll find that the effects in the scenes are boring to you and you'll wonder why people care, but other than that, I don't think it'll affect you adversely. (And they'll eventually get over the whole 3d thing and start actually producing good movies again eventually, too.)
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...is the real skill. See cross-viewing here. I'm afraid I have a bit of the binocular problem they describe there, but I hope to improve.
There are a few major approaches being used right now. They all come down to delivering a different image for the left and right eyes. The system in TFA uses a combination of circular polarization and frame sequential techniques. Here are the major techniques currently used:
Frame sequential
_This uses a single projector or screen with a high framerate, 120Hz or higher. Each frame alternates between a left and right eye view. The viewer wears a pair of LCD 'shutter glasses' which are synchronized to flicker and allow only the correct frame through per eye. Thus, a 120Hz output becomes a 60Hz image stream to the viewer. Unfortunately, the glasses are expensive and not easy to deploy to a large audience. This technique also often causes headaches after extended viewing.
Head mounted display
_Funky goggles are used to provide a dedicated image for each eye in close proximity. Advantages include the ability for head tracking which provides parallax shift and real immersion. The units are also localized to the wearer, so you can have them in small spaces like cockpits. Disadvantages: relatively low resolution and expensive for large deployments.
Linear polarization
_Using 2 projectors (usually DLP) which have linearly polarized filters in front of the lenses, one has left-right polarization for one image and the second an up-down polarization for the other eye. The user wears paper glasses with lens orientation corresponding the the projector output. This technique is easiest to deploy to large audiences since the paper glasses are relatively cheap. However, the 3D effect can be broken by rotating the head.
Circular polarization
_Similar as the linear approach, filters are used in front of 2 projectors creating left-right images. The filters used for the projectors and glasses are circularly polarized which allows head rotation, but suffers from 'ghosting' or 'image bleed' since the circular polarization does not block all light intended for the other eye.
Chromatic filtering
_Similar to the old red and blue glasses from yesteryear, this technique uses spectrum filtering to restrict certain wavelengths from reaching each eye. When used with filters in front of 2 projectors, dedicated left-right images can be created. The newer techniques use more controlled filtering so that the color aberrations are minimized.
Lenticular
_Using a special vertically banded lenticular lens in front of a back-projection screen or TFT/Plasma, this technique creates 'zones' in which 3D images can be seen without any hardware required on the viewer. By shifting your head left or right, you fall into viewing 'sweet-spots'. This is based on the fact that a human's eyes are generally spaced the same distance apart. One of the great things about this approach is that since there are images from multiple camera angles being displayed simultaneously, you can actually get a little parallax before falling out of a sweet-spot. You'll see this technique more and more at trade shows and in public advertisements.
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IMAX 3D is based on polarised light exactly the same as ReadID. It causes a headache because the false 3D effect causes your eyes to focus at the wrong distance.
Agreed, Meet The Robinsons was really stunning. I caught myself admiring the animation and 3D quite a bit to the detriment of following the film (no big deal, really).
The only problem I had was that at the very beginning, after getting the instructions to put the glasses on, the first 3D stuff was a trailer for a Tim Burton animated Halloween movie - this scared the crap out of my kids (aged 5, 5, and 4, this being the first time they experienced 3D), with all sorts of nasties reaching out of the screen at them. They followed that with an old 1950's 3D cartoon with Donald Duck, which was harmless and would have made a much better introduction to 3D for the millions of little kids who will see it.
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Others have commented about this but I haven't seen the point yet made this way. A two-image 3D effect is realistic only from one seat in the house. In practice, there is a fairly small "sweet spot." If you view from too close to the screen, the image doesn't have enough depth; too far away, it has too much. Off to the side, everything that should be square becomes skewed, rhomboidal.
Oddly enough, exactly the same problems exist in 2D, but they are nowhere near as disturbing, presumably because 2D does look like 3D in the first place.
The second issue is that the cinematographer is limited to a single focal length. In effect, the location of the "sweet spot" depends on the lens. With a long lens, the sweet spot is toward the back of the house; with a wide-angle lens, toward the front. In practice, only a normal lens gives the real "you-are-there" 3D effect. Anything else looks distorted. What this means is that to make a 3D film the filmmakers have to throw out most of their lenses and a century of film grammar.
A third issue is that 3D photography is unflattering to actresses, because with 3D you can see the actual three-dimensional contours of their faces, which in 3D cannot be hidden or concealed with makeup, at least not in a closeup. (I'm using sexist language because for the most part a smoothly contoured face is still considered much more important for actresses than for actors). For a good example of this, see the 1950s 3D movie "Kiss Me Kate."
These fatal flaws will continue to restrict two-image 3D to a limited set of special applications: animated features and movies in which spectacle is important.
All of this, incidentally, is exactly what happened with Cinerama in the 1950s. It was not a true 3D process but was spectacular, beautiful, and pleasant to view--superior to present-day 2D Imax. The fatal flaw was not the three-projector system, although that was a problem. The fatal flaws were exactly the ones that two-image 3D has: the real Cinerama experience was only to be had from seats in the center of the house; telephoto lenses couldn't be used; and it was a challenge to use it for film storytelling (of about ten films made in Cinerama, only two--How the West was Won and The Wonderful Tales of the Brothers Grimm--had real story lines, the others were basically travelogues. Of course, to call a Cinerama film "basically a travelogue" is like calling Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue "basically a medley.")
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When there's porn in 3D, then it'll take off. Just look at VHS and the Internet. I mean, since when "Disney uses the technology" has been a reason to adopt a new technology?