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Consumer 3D Television Moving Forward
TheSync writes "Hollywood Reporter claims that SMPTE (the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers) will 'establish an industry task force to define the parameters of a mastering standard for 3D content distributed via broadcast, cable, satellite, packaged media and the Internet, and played-out on televisions, computer screens and other tethered displays.' Already, Japanese Nippon BS viewers with Hyundai 3D LCD sets can watch an hour of 3D programming daily. Even your existing DLP TV set might be 3D capable today with the addition of LCD shutter glasses."
Reader DaMan1970 makes note of another developing television technology; telescopic pixel displays. "Each pixel consists of 2 opposing mirrors where the primary mirror can change shape under an applied voltage. When the pixel is off, the primary & secondary mirrors are parallel & reflect all of the incoming light back into the light source."
I wouldn:t buy this until IEEE is on board...
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
When I sit down at my computer i am engaged and am accomplishing something(most of the time), but when i sit down to watch TV i want to be completely relaxed and just watch. If this means i will have to be more aware of my TV then im not for it. Also my TV is often on in the background, which means I'll have to wear the special glasses all the time which isn't gonna happen.
After decades of annoying flicker, strobing, and bad pans at 24FPS, we finally got LCD panels that don't flicker at all. Some monitors even time-interpolate to get the frame rate up, and framefree compression is just starting to work. Now people want to crud it up with alternating-frame stereo. Bleah.
Stereo vision doesn't really do much beyond about 4m or so, and it scales badly for anything that isn't its real size.
There are some very cute 3D systems that are sensitive to head position, so you can move your head and have the scene adjust accordingly. But that doesn't work in theaters.
I don't get why people want this. Most real-world 3D perception (the kind of scenes you see in movies) derives from motion parallax, not binocular stereo. Trying to use stereo for those scenes is completely unrealistic and visually disturbing.
Also, flat images are kind of scale free, but 3D scenes are not. If you watch Jurassic Park in 3D on your television, you really do see a bunch of 8 inch toy dinosaurs fighting in a little box. Ooh, scary.
Well if you use a compatible DLP projector (such as those listed here: "http://www.stereo3d.com/cgi-bin/discus/show.cgi?3177/3347") instead of a pc screen with the shutter glasses, and make the screen very large, the 3d effect is just as if you are looking just as you would normally. Space faring games such as Eve or X3 look the most impressive since it appears that you are floating in infinite space and very massive objects are in your neighbourhood. The cave exploration scenes from Half Life 2 episode 2 were also quite gobsmackingly fantastic; if you put the room light on it appears as though there is a cave system adjunct to the room! And the imposing obsidian combine walls do cause claustrophobia. Stalker had the most detailed 3d models I've seen however, I stood walking around the busted old bus shelter for hours in amazement at it's realism. So did my friends and even my mother, so I think it does help to have a very large screen.
How's this for an idea?
How about all you entertainment and media companies just assume that after a hard day's work, all I really want to do is just sit there and BE ENTERTAINED. Yes, you can have a wedge of my cash for the privelige of doing so and if you make it appealing enough to me then I might just drag my fat lazy ass into the car so I can drive to the local cinema to go see what you have on offer.
But please stop with all this "interactive" and gimmicky shit, okay? I can quite happily sit here in front of my computer for the occasionally half-hour and be thoroughly entertained by a 20-year-old 48kb game called "Jet Set Willy" and then be equally entertained by pounding alien heads in Half-Life 2. I don't ALWAYS need whizzy graphics & 8GB of installed game to be immersed, sometimes simple shit does fine.
Likewise, I don't need to "Pick N Mix" my own songs for my own CD compilation because I'm more than happy to accept that an army of musicians, producers & media types are a whole heap better at that shit than I am - most of the time, I just want to give you some money, take a shiny disk in exchange, throw it into my hifi and let it play, okay?
So please don't think I am sat here waiting for 3D TV because somehow I need to be "more immersed" in your shit, okay? Believe it or not, most of the time a 2D TV, a pizza and a few beers is enough to keep me happy.
How about we make it simple? You keep offering good quality shit at a reasonable price and I will just BUY it so I can watch/read/listen to it.
Just DANCE FOR ME MONKEY BOY! Okay?
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.