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The Joke Known As 3D TV
harrymcc writes "I'm at IFA in Berlin — Europe's equivalent of the Consumer Electronics Show — and the massive halls are dominated by 3D TVs made by everyone from Sony, Samsung, and Panasonic to companies you've never heard of. The manufacturers seem pretty excited, but 3D has so many downsides — most of all the lousy image quality and unimpressive dimensionality effect — that I can't imagine consumers are going to go for this. 'As a medium, 3D remains remarkably self-trivializing. Virtually nobody who works with it can resist thrusting stuff at the camera, just to make clear to viewers that they’re experiencing the miracle of the third dimension. When Lang Lang banged away at his piano during Sony’s event, a cameraman zoomed in and out on the musical instrument for no apparent reason, and one of the company’s representatives kept robotically shoving his hands forward. Hey, it’s 3D — watch this!'"
the first post at the camera
I was in Fry's Electronics a few weeks ago, and they had a 3D TV demo set up. I tried it, and was blown away by how bad the quality was. It flickered, gave me a headache, and didn't have much of a 3D effect at all. I assumed that they guys at Fry's didn't know what they were doing and had set it up wrong, but from this article it sounds like they might have.
Hahah. They're too scared to *not* put out a crappy product.
Was that a recurrent, annoying joke of the late John Candy on the SCTV comedy show, where he was constantly thrusting his hands towards the camera to highlight the 3D effect? The parent post is reality imitating art.
"Virtually nobody who works with it can resist thrusting stuff at the camera"
The porn industry caught on fast.
So, now they need something else to sell. After 3D will be Ultra HD (the prices would be too high now), followed by Ultra HD 3D, and then something else.
3D TV reminds me of BluRay or HDTV. They're all marketed as the next big thing but all they do is make
it a bit prettier. What about spending more money on making it a better story? Making it prettier does
not make it better, it makes it prettier. Its only a distraction from the plot not an enhancement
and its only the stupid who fall for it but then they are just as likely to be impressed by a piece of
shiny foil.
Its worse than PhysX for games. At least that could be used to enhance gameplay but all they seem to do is try to
make things look a bit prettier.
You're bitching about the douchebaggery of program producers, not the TV gizmo.
Get a brain.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
This latest crop of 2D-to-3D technology is best used in 5-minute amusement park rides, where all the other 3D tech belongs. At best, it provides a few cool moments during the action scenes. At worst, you have a headache after too many blurry shapes try to trick your brain into seeing depth that isn't there and have to stop watching.
.
When you add another dimension to a playback medium, the first temptation is to exploit that new dimension to the point of exaggeration. That is where 3-D TV is now.
Give the creative types a few years and 3D TV will look very differently. Heck, it may even work without those awful glasses........
If 3D content creators would stop making window violations and (my favourite) changing the convergence point of the screen without zooming (and vice versa) the idea that 3d is going to give headaches wouldn't have as much fact to go on. I'm sure some people get headaches anyway, but the majority of the people get them because of this stupid filmography. Also, stop changing the 3d depth every shot. I'm looking at you, Avatar.
If you give the brain realistic input that could actually happen, people would be more comfortable with it and it would be more likely to sell.
Also, the ghosting on some glasses is terrible. I could even see it in RealD, but it wasn't nearly as bad as some systems I've used (especially anaglyphs).
I hope it gets good before everyone becomes disinterested, because I'm actually excited for 3d to become kindof standard.
All those TVs look pretty flat to me.
With the prices dropping on HD TV's, they need to find something with a high markup that the chumps^H^H^H^H^H^H videophiles will buy. There are only so many $500 ethernet cables you can sell.
Atlas stands on the earth and carries the celestial sphere on his shoulders.
I'm looking forward to the dual mini display port implants in my skull next year.
3DTV itself, or rather stereoscopic display technology, is perfectly fine. The problem lies in pants-on-head-retard directors who wouldn't know convergence depth interocular distance from their own anus. Creating stereoscopic video that doesn't cause headaches is HARD. You can;t justtape two cameras together and carry on as usual, and you sure as hell can't expect a 2D movie retrofitted to 3D to look even half decent.
Imagine if colour TV had started of with everything in bright block primary colours only.
According to this Slashdot post, 3D can harm child and maybe adult vision.
One of the fundamental problems with 3D movies and TV is this: Close-to-the-viewer images that appear far to one side of the screen. The problem? You go blind in one eye. To create the appropriate binocular disparity, the "other" image would need to appear in a direction for which there is no screen, thus, no image is presented to one eye. The result is jarring and upsetting.
James Cameron seems to have figured this out in Avatar and avoided doing it for the most part.
How else to avoid the problem? Use a really big screen (in terms of angle subtended at the viewer's position) such as Imax. What does this portend for 3D TV? Nothing good, since TVs almost universally, even with "large" screens, do not subtend an adequate angle.
When color TVs became affordable for the consumer market and television programs started broadcasting in color the amount of garish costumes and set designs and other "look ma, its in color" gaucherie was lampooned mercilessly. The technology was refined and eventually turned out alright, even though it went through a stage at the advent of color when it verged on the psychedelic.
Discounting 3D at this stage of the technology is a patently absurd prognostication given the history of the TV.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Look, we realize that, for the first time since any of us were alive, the tech press and the traditional (by which I mean retarded) press have finally found something to agree on: 3D (or to call it properly, stereoscopic) TV is a gimmick made of fail.
But we here on /. realized that 6 months or a year ago, when the first of the current wave of 3D TV sets started being demoed, promoted, and scorned as a gimmick in the tech press. The rest of the world realized it a few months later, when they started showing up and being scorned as gimmicks in the general press. You could always back off the pace of news articles on it until there's something, y'know... new to report.
Everyone who already shared your opinion (probably half of people, if you'd believe it) and all those who will be converted are on your side already, and getting bored. Those of who think "yeah, but it's a cool gimmick, can't wait for the price to come down" or "yeah, by itself it's a gimmick, but it becomes part of a great 3D visualization suite when I add my homebrew webcam headtracker..." just get madder every time you come back on telling them "You're wrong -- here's what you should think". And people who just don't give a fuck about 3D TV are tuning you out completely.
Especially on /., can't we stick to actual news, and maybe some opinion pieces on topics that don't resemble pulverised equine corpses?
Absolutely amazing. The amount of effort that people are putting out in order to bash a completely optional technology is staggering. No one is being forced to watch anything in 3D; no one is being forced to purchase 3D technology. Yet, so many people do anything they can to degrade a technology that they're not required to use with phrases like "goofy glasses" and "gimmick". Now "joke" can be added to that list. Might as well start calling the upsizing of fast-food value meals a "joke" and a "gimmick" considering that they're available, they're more expensive, and you're under no obligation to purchase those - just like 3D TV. I've pretty much come to the conclusion that the efforts of those who looks to denigrate this technology, which in its current form is clearly in its infancy, amount to nothing more than trolling.
If you don't want it, then DON'T BUY IT! Why is this so difficult for these anti-3D trolls to undertstand?
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
Since 3D is so new, many people are choosing to criticism the entire medium via poorly generated content.
There are soooo many ways to mess up the 3D experience its not even funny.. Nobody's been properly trained in the do's and don't yet.. and so much is being rushed to market.
but when done right it's truly a compelling experience.
It's not fair to completely slam the genre of theater after seeing a few badly written plays.
Some 3D *wins*
* taking 3d photos/video with a fujifilm w3 camera.
* street fighter IV via Nvidia's 3d-Vision
* Avatar (They always maintain a proper depth of field with proper levels of focus)
* Sonic Sega Racing / TrackMania
* PORN (adult4d.com) -or shooting your own homemade with the above fujifilm
But yeah.. everything else sucks and hurts your head.
hurts it BAD. :/
one last thing, 3d projectors are always better than TVs.. *no ghosting!
Acer 5360 only 600 bux.
Yes there are crowds other than than sports fanatics that are actually to spend time glued to the tv for hours on end wearing these glasses. But I think the time when this is status quo, at least in the US, is long past.
Many would say that the going to movies is in decline because TV is catching up to major budget movie quality and because the experience is not what it used to be. I would say the reason for this is that people are less willing to sit idly for an hour or so and passively consume entertainment. The 3D tv is part of that passive consumption, and if we won't do it theaters, why would we do it at home, where are not prohibited for texting on our phones or loading up a video game on our portable player, simply because so relic for the 20th century thinks it is rude.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
People accept glasses for watching 3D movies in theaters because they are there for the experience of watching a film on a giant screen with other people while eating popcorn and drinking soda. The same goes for other specific, controlled environments, like 3D CAM in an office; people accept it as part of the experience (or job in this case).
3D in the home will never succeed until and unless glasses are not needed. It doesn't matter whether the glasses are disposable or expensive, or if today's multiple competing standards congeal into one. No one will accept needing to constantly put on and take off 3D glasses to watch TV. Period.
I sat a few of my friends down to watch some scenes from Avatar in 2D, and one of their jaws dropped at how much worse the CG looks. 3D corrupts the live actors just enough to make the CG look of similar quality -- when it's in 2D, that effect goes away. I didn't do this to rag on Avatar's CG, but to show them how 3D destroys image quality even on something that is filmed specially for it.
I'm not looking forward to the day when the first 3D-only movie comes out.
I love 3 Dimensional TV done well. We have two eyes and see in 3D in the real world ... without having things shoved in our faces. Calm down content producers ... we get the point. 3DTV is here to stay - so start doing it right ...
Film like its a window into the world your watching - not like its a threshold for all sorts of stuff to poke out of.
I'll get 3D TV when it involves a holography platform. Until then... probably not.
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
Just don't buy a 3D TV. The manufacturers will get the hint.
I'm at the Premium Buyer's Exhibition in New York — the 1950's equivalent of the Consumer Electronics Show — and the massive halls are dominated by color TVs made by everyone from RCA to GE and Honeywell to companies you've never heard of. The manufacturers seem pretty excited, but color has so many downsides — most of all the lousy image quality and unimpressive color effect — that I can't imagine consumers are going to go for this. 'As a medium, color remains remarkably self-trivializing. Virtually nobody who works with it can resist flaunting garish stuff at the camera, just to make clear to viewers that they’re experiencing the miracle of color. When Elvis banged away at his piano during RCA’s event, a cameraman zoomed in and out on his ridiculous shoes for no apparent reason, and one of the company’s representatives kept robotically flicking his tie forward. Hey, it’s color — watch this!
bite my glorious golden ass.
Let's hear lots of comments by people who haven't seen 3D TV. And then let's have poorly-woorded descriptions of a visual medium than can only really be appreciated by experiencing it.
This is the Internet at it's most Internet-like.
"Clearly, 3D TV sucks because it's expensive and I haven't purchased one yet. If I decide to buy one, it is because it has improved and no longer sucks."
New technologies are -always- annoying to show that they can do it. Stereo audio is one main point. Listen to recordings from when stereo was just coming out and you will hear sound shift from left to right over and over again just so they can say they did it. Look at some of the programs when color TV first came out, they used hideous color schemes to show that you could have color. Look at the the early Nintendo DS games which were all "draw something with the stylus" games before they started to get better. Etc.
.gif images -everywhere- on the web in the 90s?). 3-D is the same way, it will be annoying at first but when the technology improves and directors make things work, things get a lot better.
Early "new" technologies show the worst at the beginning (anyone else remember the age of animated
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
"When Lang Lang banged away at the piano"? I was following along with your little hate piece with interest until this statement...
Accommodative input is the future. Period. We will eventually have technology which allows us to adapt content to the human receiver. This is not in dispute. Presentation and interaction methods which use these techniques well will dominate over those that don't. You can already see examples of this. The experience of watching a movie on a large theater screen is vastly different from watching it on a cheap 19" TV. Cruddy audio equipment doesn't have the same impact as a live performance. A real book is much easier to become absorbed in than the same content on most e-readers. Video games with poor camera behavior and non-intuitive controls aren't as fun to play. Psychologists and technologists have studied the hell out of it - immersion, emotional design, adaptive interfaces...they make up new names for different aspects of the problem almost every week. But for the most part, this is the future. There is a lot of promise, but for the most part we have to settle for emulating "real" versus contrived input and interaction to some functional level of fidelity which we can tolerate in order to pick up additional functionality (often portability) which the technological approach enables. Other cases do work better, but only if you're talking about expensive research prototypes which address a single aspect of a broader frontier.
The problem is that this leads to the mistaken assumption that our current implementations are accurate representations of their eventual successors. In most cases, they're not. 3D is probably one of the biggest culprits here. It's too easy to go "hey look, 3D displays - it's just like looking at real objects!"...but that's not really it. We've managed to come up with a number of technologies which give decent approximations of several depth cues beyond those available in a static 2D image (e.g. shadows, object occlusion, perspective methods). This is wonderful. But it's important to keep one point in mind, a point which is constantly overlooked.
All current 3D display technology falls well short of producing fully "believable" input.
Yeah. And that's setting aside the whole "movie producers keep producing trashy fake 3D pictures to raise ticket prices" issue - which is a major complication of itself. If you use good current 3D hardware to display a well-made 3D picture which was shot for 3D and where the medium was used intelligently...it will still degrade the image quality over 2D, people will still get simulator sickness, and a fairly large slice of your audience will even still see it in 2D.
The first problem, degradation, can be minimized through special screens and top-end equipment, but you can't really eliminate it since there it provides a much more complex problem compared to doing the same thing in 2D with the same grade of equipment - or worse (and more realistically), the same budget. This is orders of magnitude worse if you want your 3D installation to be a theater setting since you have to serve many people sitting at many distances and viewing angles, each of whom is using different eyes and different brains to process the input. Honestly, with any existing technology, the only thing you can do in a 3D theater is try to minimize how bad it is and minimize how much it costs you to set up. There is no good solution here. Polarized light projection is really the best way...but it's quite vulnerable to off-axis viewing. Alternating frame projection is better in that sense - off-axis problems are comparatively minor - but the headsets are quite expensive (polarized glasses can be effectively disposable) and many viewers will perceive constant flickering which is annoying at best but more likely a quick trigger for simulator sickness (above the already inherent risk with 3D from conflicting visual cues).
The second and third problems are more or less related. The human visual system relies on a large set of visual cues to create a 3D model of your environment, and stereoscopy is only one factor. Admittedly, it's a fairly major factor, and a
Stereoscopic 3D has two very serious problems that have never been solved. The first is the "sweet spot" problem. Imagine a person standing so that they are lined up exactly with a flagpole. In real life, if you move to one side or the other, the relationship changes and you can now see the flagpole... and you no longer see the person exactly in full-face, but slightly in profile. In a stereoscope 3D presentation, the relationship between the screen elements cannot change. You will see the person exactly lined up with the flagpole no matter where you sit. This sounds trivial, but if you work out the consequences, it means that if a person is standing on a square-tiled floor, the tiles must become skewed into rhombuses if you move to the side. And the depth relationships change, too. The picture becomes squashed or flattened if you sit too close to the screen, elongated with exaggerated depth if you set too far away.
This means that a 3D picture only looks right when viewed from one, specific seating location, the sweet spot. And, worse yet, it only looks right if the cinematographer eschews the use of wide-angle or long lenses, but films the entire movie only with lenses of the single correct focal length, which means throwing away a century of film grammar.
The valid appeal of 3D is to add the realism of depth. But unless you are sitting exactly in the sweet spot and the cinematographer has used only one focal length for the whole film, you do not get realistic depth, you get warped geometrical distortion--and worse yet distortion that changes from one shot to the next.
Have you ever watched a movie from the extreme left seat in the front row? Unpleasant, isn't it? Well, 3D has the same problem, but greatly amplified.
You may not notice it consciously, but your brain has to work overtime to prevent you from noticing it, and it is fatiguing.
The second problem involves any object whose 3D placement is in front of the screen but is near the edges. It is a little hard to explain, but remember that without glasses the object shows up double, as a pair. If it is well in front of the screen, it is a widely separated pair. The glasses make sure your right eye sees only the left image of the pair and vice versa, but the problem is that as the object moves toward the left edge of the screen, one image moves offscreen and disappears before the other does. So, as these objects approach the edge, you see them only with one eye. This actually happens in real life for objects behind a rectangular opening, as in a proscenium theatre stage, so you are used to it and it seems natural. But in real life it never happens for objects that are in front of a rectangular opening, and it is weird, unnatural, and fatiguing. The only way to solve it is to have a screen so huge you don't really see or notice the edges. This probably explains why IMAX 3D is relatively successful--it takes a giant screen to avoid the edge effect.
Together, these two problems mean that 3D cannot just make a scene look realistic and more natural--not unless you project it on a giant IMAX screen and sit exactly at the sweet spot. Under any other conditions, it looks goofy, unnatural, and distracting.
There's no way to fix it. Four people sitting in a four difference seats in a live theatre have eight eyes and views the scene from 8 slightly different points of view. Showing the person in the left seat of the fifth row the pair of images that would be seen by a person sitting in the center seat of the twentieth row isn't going to work. If there are four people sitting in your living room in four different chairs, they need to have four different pairs of image shown to them, a different one for each seating position.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
How is it possible that no one has yet posted this link?
they must work in the adult industry.
Dr Tongue's "3D House Of Stewardesses!" SCARY!
3D exists in its present incarnation for one primary reason; it will drive the theater chains to move to digital projection, a process that has been stalled. 3D movies require digital projection. When Digital projection is more widespread then the studios and distributors can move to digital delivery and save the cost and headache of traditional release prints and shipping. Once the theaters have been converted to digital the 3D push will fade out like the fad that it is.
welcome the trolls that will send us 3-d shock websites. imagine typical macintosh user with smellovision?
I'm guessing the goatse.3d website will be a pit of unpleasantness.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Hell I still have plenty of customers on regular SD sets because to their glasses wearing peepers that is plenty "good enough"
You need an HDTV to surf the web or play PC games on your TV. Few PCs have SDTV output out of the box (instead needing a gaming video card or a $40 Sewell scan converter), and even on those that do, text easily gets too blurry to read. Most HDTVs have VGA and HDMI inputs for use with PCs' VGA and DVI-D outputs.
and the 10th is usually calling me to set up a WD TV so they can just skip discs altogether.
Apple TV has only an HDMI output, and the "regular SD sets" you speak of don't have an HDMI or DVI-D input. Does this WD TV box have composite output, or does it need an HDTV?
Maybe everybody is pushing 3D so much because the RIAA and others love this technology because of one thing: you can't film the movie with a classic camera (and I can't really imagine a way to properly film it).
(You can still watch one of the images if put glasses on the camera, but I think that this will be really, really bad-looking)
But I don't think that's the case, 3D is just hype, and a lot of people think that's good and worth spending a lot of money (mainly because of ads).
The thing I remember most from seeing Avatar in IMAX 3D was actually the trailer for Hubble 3D. I finally saw it today and I was not disappointed. Seeing 3D documentary footage of the shuttle crew prepping for a flight, seeing not one but two shuttle launches in 3D, and seeing numerous spacewalks in 3D was awe inspiring. I find a lot of 3D feature length films to be a little fatiguing, but I think the less gimmicky (although still undeniably gimmicky to a point) IMAX 3D documentaries show the potential for using 3D in a tasteful artistic manner.
If we're going to be wearing glasses anyway, why isn't everyone going for 3d with headset displays? Everyone's going to want all kinds of augmented reality stuff anyway. Games and porn alone could get it paid for.
Or is there something totally stupid about putting a screen next to each eyeball that I don't know about?
Ha, I guess games would be enough.
Yep, the RIAA is thrilled that I can't record their audio in 3D with my camcorder!
Hint: The particular branch of the mafiaa you were thinking of is the MPAA. The RIAA could care less about 3D, they're too busy suing children and grannies for downloading an MP3 of the latest talentless bubblegum pop sensation of the minute.
This seems to be a common argument these days.
If you don't like the trend of networks pouring resources into vacuous Reality TV programs, then simply don't watch them.
If you don't like Apple making moral judgments on which apps should be available on their app store, then don't buy their products.
If you don't like sitting through 20 minutes of commercials, then don't go to the movies.
When did the boycott become the only allowable form of consumer criticism?
With a real 3D display, there are so many things you could do... with stereo, you get exactly what you've been getting all along, that is, the single viewpoint they think you should have, and that's it. Yeah, you'll think you're perceiving depth, but that goes away the moment you move your head and the image doesn't change the way it should.
Because actual 3D isn't just about providing two different images (which is what stereovision does.) It's about providing the two images that match the viewing angle your position and head angle set up relative to the material being viewed.
Me, I'm good with 2D until 3D actually arrives. Stereovision... no thanks.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
One of the manufacturers- I can't recall who (gee, good ad)- dared to show the family sitting with their little goggles in front of the TV. That thing vanished from the airwaves faster than any ad I've ever seen. *Everyone* I know was making fun of it, young and old alike.
They need to overcome the goofy factor.
And this: http://art.penny-arcade.com/photos/932182163_EazuQ-L.jpg
We saw the same discussion here a few years ago with HD TVs. "Nobody cares about HD gaming". "Nobody can even see a difference". "Nobody will buy a $4000 TV".
This is a technology site. It really surprises me people can't see how this is going to go.
OK: first, likely there will be a successor technology that delivers 3d without glasses - and probably not that far off. But even if there isn't, what do you need to implement 3d as it is now? A fast enough refresh rate and shutter glasses. Eventually, that refresh rate will just be standard. Why wouldn't it be? Again, think back to HD. Yeah it was expensive once. Now it's just standard, whether people need or really want it or not. And shutter glasses. I predict these will be under $20 within 3 years - there's no tech in there that necessitates an expensive product. So 3d will essentially be free on a new TV.
And really, 3d is pretty good sometimes. Ever play a good racing game in 3d? It's way better - way more sense of speed. Did you see Avatar? Up? How to Train Your Dragon? Despite being essentially first generation titles, they were all great - and all better because of 3d. Content will just get better, and eventually 2d TV will start to look like it's missing something. Now sure lots of content won't benefit much - but that's the same with HD. Or color.
All of this is obvious.
The only reasons I can see behind the doomsaying are sour grapes (I don't want to buy a new TV), elitism (I enjoy films at a deeper level than visual gimmickry), or just plain lack of imagination. I want to go back sometime and dredge up some anti-HD posts... but it'd be easier to just do a text replace on this thread.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
It gets me, that every fucking set top box, every bluray player, every piece of software that comes out to play the studio's precious 3d content is so crippled with drm crap, it's almost impossible to get it to work. It's sad that people keep buying this crap. The studios decide they want more drm crap built into tv's so they start a media campaign to sell every moron on the planet 1080p tv's with hdmi 1.3, since 1080i tv's and their hdmi 1.2 weren't secure enough for them. For get that nobody can tell the difference between 1080p and 1080i tv unless you tell them which is which, just like if you ask someone to pick which mp3 is encoded at 256k and which at 384k.
Sitting through "Avatar" in 3D was great because of the immersive experience from a screen larger than my house. Watching "Avatar" in 3D on a 32-inch set sounds tedious. It's not immersion, it's a window — and not a very good one.
BUT if I could play a 3D game through that window, it might be awesome. Games can dynamically set depth of field and perspective so the window will feel exactly like that — a window on the real world. Playing a Formula One race car game could be truly amazing with this technology.
introduce the Rush song "The Weapon" (in 3-D, of course)
"Without the glasses, you'' only see it in 1/2 D"
hysterical
http://rookery9.aviary.com.s3.amazonaws.com/4294000/4294479_659f_625x1000.jpg
Table-ized A.I.
In theory you may be correct, but in reality 3D TV has some major technological hurdles to overcome before it becomes practical. Stereo sound, color vision, and high definition were incremental improvements that didn't change the fundamental nature of television; none of them faced the real technical challenges that 3D TV does.
I'm still waiting for Smell-0-Vision. And my flying car.
I think we need to wait until Microsoft and Apple check in on the issue so we can "align" our opinions correctly without having to actually think. Personally I expect the 3D Zune to beat the iPod 3D to market; which would, of course, confirm the parent article's conclusion - but what if Apple takes the first sip of the Kool-Aid?
The US government have made it clear that we have no inalienable rights; any we do not defend vigorously will be taken.
Stereoscopic TV ("3D" is a bit much) is awful in the living room. You have to wear glasses(!) You have to sit upright. Strobing comes back. We finally have a display technology with no flicker, and the industry wants to throw that away. This will work fine if you have a proper "home theater" setup, but it's going to suck for casual viewing.
If we really had 3D (you move, the viewpoint changes) that would be cool. There are systems that do that, and they don't even require glasses. (Only one person at a time can watch, though, because the image is adjusted for viewer location.) Tut that's not what's shipping.
A scary thought: the way to make this tolerable is to have the TV watch the audience. If there's anybody in the room not wearing glasses, the system drops the stereoscopy. Once that capability is in, the TV can be set up to pause if people leave. So you can't go away during commercials.
Another huge problem with 3D is the size of the viewport. Imagine watching a live play in your living room, except all the action must take place within the bounds of a relatively small rectangular window 10 feet away. Although objects may appear to move in front of the window, they must remain bounded by the rectangular pyramid formed between your eye and the viewport - otherwise the illusion is broken as the "3D" object moves at least partially off the screen.
3D is great in movie theaters - particularly IMAX - because the viewport is large enough to avoid many of the above issues.
I forgot to mention the evidence for this. Most of the popular sitcoms from the era that we still watch, such as Gilligan's Island, Bewitched, and The Andy Griffith Show shot their content in black-and-white until around about 1966. (Some early episodes have since been artificially colorized.) They wouldn't have used black-and-white if the color audience was sufficient.
Table-ized A.I.
Click here to see one of my favorites
"It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too." --Eugene Wigner
3D TV will not win... Hologram TV will...
There are just too many hurdles to showing a movie, TV show, or sports to an audience larger than 1. Having to wear glasses every time you sit down to watch TV is just not going to cut it. Plus, there is a large percentage of the population that gets sick watching 3D. You'll see it used for special movies (Avatar) and events (Superbowl), but everyday TV and movies will be in 2D for at least the next decade. Only when we get hologram technology will 3D become usable in the home.
Will 3D TVs sell? Yes.
Will everyday 3D programming be successfull? No.
Will movies, special events, and games be developed and become successfull in 3D in the home? Yes.
From the point of view that people will buy 3D TVs (devices), 3D technology will eventually be in every home, but only because it will become a standard feature in TVs, much like closed captioning.
From the point of view of programming, 2D will be King for a long while to come. That is until we get hologram technology...
David
Jim Henson's Muppet Vision 3D was the apex of 3D anything ever. This is two decades old, and still the best use of the "current" 3D gimmick, mainly because they knew it was just a gimmick when they made it.
When HDTV came out, there were a lot of production problems revealed. I remember one of the first CSI episodes where George Eads looked orange. Reason was not that he'd overdone a tan, but that they used really intense makeup. NTSC has much poorer colour handling, so makeup was overdone. HDTV is better at dealing with colour capture and transmission.
When moving to a new technology flaws in your old process can show up.
To me, a more convincing 3D tech was one demoed at TED. It was a head tracking technology that did just what you describe on a normal 2D display. In fact when the tracker was on a TV camera, you could see it on video. So no depth like you get with a 3D display, but it looks better and needs no glasses. Of course it only works for one person.
I'll personally be sticking with 2D displays for now, until something better comes out.
I speak for everyone about 3D movies and TV.
Please Stop.
Thank you.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
If I have to wear glasses anyway, why not put LCDs in the glasses themselves? You'd get a full edge-to-edge experience, avoiding some of the weird off-screen 3D effects. You'd always be in the "sweet spot", avoiding the off-center weird geometry effects. You could go 120Hz on both eyes and make the correct matching frames appear at exactly the same time, avoiding the headache-inducing strobe effect. You would not have ghosting or other distortion caused by trying to use the same display surface for two independent images.
I am cautiously optimistic about 3D as a whole, but I don't understand why I need to buy into the 3D TV paradigm in order to get a 3D experience. I would prefer to simply use active-screen glasses.
the feeling of an orchestra actually playing in my living room.
Personally, I can't think of anything I would like less than having an orchestra actually playing in my living room.
Quadraphonic sound tried to that with audio in the late sixties, and it fell flat with a resounding thud! People only have two ears and the synthesize the rest from hat they hear through those two ears. It is enough to be able to position an instrument or vocalist along a left to right axis. People really didn't care that the second oboe was positioned behind the first bassoon.
Keep in mind that this was audio and that the "stage" could be potentially infinite along that left-right axis. (Headphones worked great because the actual distance didn't matter, only the perceived displacement between sound sources.)
In 3D movies it would matter a great deal if a performer was behind another.
In 2+D movies, where position is taken as important, though it may lead to disorientation and optical illusions but it is not essential, our brains have evolved mirror neurons and a whole set of visual disambiguation mechanisms to recreate a 3D scene from stereo-optic 2D image capture through binocular senses and reintegrate all of this using relative parallax and scaling of objects.
3D is not only difficult but pointless; literally as in the intended POV (Point Of View) intended by the director would be lost
That they shoot the movies in 3D is fine, that they playback movies in 2+D on a flat screen and involve our unthinking portion of our brain is also fine.
Until we have home theaters which can behave like holo-decks, its futile ice it would take that level of immersiveness for 3D to be more that an annoyance.
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If they can give a 3D experience without the glasses, I think a lot of 3D TV complaints would fall away, especially as content creators stopped treating it as a gimmick and more as the status quo. But until the shutter glasses are gone, I don't think it matters *how* cheap the glasses and TVs get, I just don't see it gaining much ground. The glasses just cause too many issues on their own. The easiest to point out, and the most difficult to hand-wave away is: what if I have a large group of people over to watch a movie, and I don't have enough glasses to go around? I'm a bachelor, so I really only need one pair of glasses. Should I really need to buy three, four, or more pairs to have hanging around for bad movie night? And when they're not being used, they're taking up more space, and can get lost or damaged without much notice. Oh joy. Then I have to hope that the battery doesn't die since I didn't charge the glasses since the last time they were used, because my friend just tossed them where I didn't notice. Then there's every other issue with the glasses that regularly comes up, which can probably be found elsewhere in the thread.
Remember, the public, above all else, wants convenience. That's why automatic transmissions became popular while they were still less efficient than manuals, why CDs were more popular than cassettes, why you can sell a person a $120 package to set up their new laptop that consists solely of running windows update and burning recovery CDs for them, why three-colour ink tanks in printers persist, and why HDTV took off once you could sell them the "complete" HD experience of the TV, the Blu-Ray player, and the High-Def cable package all at once.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
The trivialized can later become the normalized and even novelized. Just look at "Schindler's List"" and the spots of red, or, Kia Motors hosting "the next YouTube star".
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
In the home, a TV is usually not in a special room, just for TV watching. Some high end homes have home theaters, but in most homes, even one with nice TVs, the TV is out in a public room. Ok well with any new 2D TV technology, this hasn't been a problem. People can wander in and out and they all see the same image. However with 3D TV, it is a problem. When the 3D mode is on, only people with the glasses on get a good image. Everyone else sees a blurry mess. So if you are walking through to stop and chat, it is highly annoying and the person watching has to either disengage the 3D, or you have to pick up glasses to fix the problem.
Probably be easier just to leave things 2D, over all.
I've seen -nothing- on the no glasses 3D front. Not even anything in "Early R&D, only in the research labs," kind of thing. This is just a new take on a very, very old idea. The 3D through different images to each eye with glasses has been tried and tried. It was done with coloured lenses first, and that was improved to use better keying to give better images. It has been done with polarized projectors and lenses also, I've seen IMAXes like that. This is just a technology that lets it work on an LCD TV (well, a few of them) or a single digital projector.
I fail to see why this one is any different than any of the others which is to say niche technologies that never took off. That is can be done at home doesn't matter. If it were something people watched all the time at the movies and this was just the thing that finally brought it home, sure. However it is a mostly forgotten thing (you forgot about it).
As I said, I've also seen nothing that indicated a new 3D display tech that doesn't use glasses is anywhere near the market, or for that matter even in early development.
You may want 3D TV, I think most do, but you are confusing your want with the technology's feasibility.
Newsflash: $4000 TVs didn't sell, only when they hit $1000-2000 did sales take off and today, I imagine anything over $1500 sells rather slowly. 3D TV feels much more like Blu-Ray to HD's DVD. DVD had higher res, but perhaps more important, you had a much better form factor, ease of use, and did not degrade from watching. HD had substantial footprint reduction (for fixed screen size) and weight reduction in addition to sharper picture even for SD video. Laugh if you want, but many a living room that could never fit a 40+ inch tube TV has a big flat screen hanging on the wall. In my family's case we went from 31" to 50" in roughly the same floor space. 3D could continue this trend (4-6" to 1") but that is nothing next to a 2-3 foot to 6 inch reduction.
The curse of being first. It will pass.
oh my god I hate you so much, did you just say you think it's ok to txt in a movie theater? Do you have any understanding how in a dark color scheme movie, say V for vendetta, a 2 inch cell phone screen 3 feet from me in a chair next or in front of me equals the same amount of screen space in my vision as like 5 feet of movie screen because it's 15 times closer? that fucking bright screen is a fucking beacon drowning out the whole mood of the movie. and what the fuck are you texting about that can't wait 2 hours, oh thats right. nothing. Go tweet about how much your laughing.,, no one cares
I tried visualizing the waveforms via Audacity:
My copies of Please Please Me and Hard Day's Night are in mono, but I notice a very pronounced difference in channels for Beatles For Sale, and only a slight difference in the channels on Help!
[Just tested track 1 of each album: I Saw Her Standing There, A Hard Day's Night, No Reply and Help]
Yes, I noticed that modern music tends to have less-radical differences between the channels; the first time I saw/heard noticeable difference between channels was earlier Zeppelin material - Whole Lotta Love, for instance.
I suppose, like any audio effect, it can be used effectively or ineffectively.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Comparing 3D tv to color is completely missing the problem. The move to color made sense and was a natural progression that mirrored film. The move to 3d is just another to way to get consumers to consider their old equipment obsolete and force them into buying new TVs. Like a lot of the consumer electronic gadgetry out there, the benefits are questionable at best and the upgrade treadmill only benefits the vendors. Now that they've sold digital to everyone and forced the decades-old standard into obsolescence the electronics makers smell blood. What better way to ensure profits than following the personal computer model of convincing everyone that the perfectly good equipment they bought two years ago is now "outdated" and needs replacing.
Anyone remember the 1981 movie "Comin' At Ya!"? Noted at the time for all the action shots of exaggerated movement towards the camera (arrows, knives, boobies), it was nothing but a gimmick. Sounds like almost 30 years later the salespeople are still pushing the same tricks.
Have you ever been surprised how tall or small or otherwise different some actor or TV personality looks in real life? Well, that's what impressed me the most while watching Avatar - I could see or feel, whatever, "real" sizes of objects and people. There was no need for humans to stand near aliens to let me know how tall they are, my eyes had enough hints to judge everything properly... or, perhaps better said, as intended. That's at least one great thing about 3D - hopefully, no more surprises when seeing actors in real life.
But that painful 3D-bokeh thing... it'll have to go.
Uh, dude, 3D without glasses using as standard tech as LCD displays has been around for over a decade. Lenticular arrays and parallax barrier are very old tech by now.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
Is 3D really that exciting anymore? It stopped being exciting for me when they re-released "Wax Museum" in 3D back in the 80's and my mom took me and my brother and sister to go see it. Sure, I still remember it because then it was exciting. Now it's just another technology for the sake of technology.
Avatar got such massive success because it was one of the first 3D movies who didn't really exploit 3D in childish way. Cameron used 3D for "depth" and made absolutely sure that it will be a good experience in 2D too.
That is why Avatar Blu-Rays (non 3D) broke sale records and said to be the real take off for Blu Ray. Its DVD sells well too.
OK, let me put this way. How many billions of dollars does the contact lens industry and advanced laser surgery worth?
Here is the deal. There are people, who does risk their eyes to laser surgery or live the hassle of putting something directly to their eye every morning and take off every night.
So, you are telling me, people hating wearing glasses even while they can't SEE without them will pay thousands of dollars to wear new, absolutely out of style, absolutely heavy glasses to see some demo like movie without a script at their home.
I am all for 3D but, please don't talk about glasses to me. Ask a friend about the horrifying papers they had to sign before getting surgery, just not to wear glasses.
"...immediate delivery (of TV?)"? I'd settle for getting the video and the audio to arrive at the same time, for some rough imitation of credible lip-synch. LCD TVs can't seem to handle that. OK, the fad for post-dubbing doesn't help either.
Remember "our media format does 5.1 sound" war coming from nowhere back in 2003 or so?
I just feel sorry for the artists. I remember Windows Media demos (direct from MS, perhaps they still exist?), Real Player demos and none of them told what the heck I am doing in MIDDLE of an orchestra in stage.
Hollywood has finally figured how to use 5.1 sound, some movies (even Oscar winning) can even sound "almost mono" but music industry could never figure how to use 5.1 sound. Of course, people buying "DTS audio" or "SACD" demanding every instrument coming from different speaker doesn't help.
The real problem is, you can't convince people to change the setup of 5.1 sound system they have nor you can convince them to buy an additional setup just for music. It would look funny too. 5 speakers together at front.
Really, It's bad enough I have 10 remotes somewhere in the cracks of the couch.
Now I have to buy glasses for everyone in the house. While I'm at it I'd better buy extra pairs on top of that. Because I'm positive one of the fat asses in this house is going to crush a few pair.
The TV now costs more? Now this I can't figure out at ALL. The difference between a 3D TV and a normal is what exactly? Nothing is the answer. Sorry I lied there is a cool logo plastered on the case.
Now all of a sudden I have to settle for something that looks worse that 1970 NTSC broadcasts.
The author is right. Once 3D looks natural and I can plunk my butt in front of the TV and not have to put on some head gear then I'm in.
I have looked at these UBER TV's and I have tried the glasses. To be perfectly honest I never saw a "3D" effect. I usually just got a headache.
The only reasons I can see behind the doomsaying are sour grapes (I don't want to buy a new TV), elitism (I enjoy films at a deeper level than visual gimmickry), or just plain lack of imagination. I want to go back sometime and dredge up some anti-HD posts... but it'd be easier to just do a text replace on this thread.
HD is still a marketing con, designed to maintain profit margins, however much people might buy into it. 3D is no different, just another feature to draw you to parting with your cash. Calling a refusal to buy into it "sour grapes" strikes me as the kind of spineless groupthink involved in getting your parents to buy you the latest cool toy so you can show it off for an hour on the playground.
Enjoy films however you want, but each time you yield unquestioningly to a new gimmick, your cash conditions manufacturers to bring out any old modification just to keep you sedated. It's a regressive spiral whose only ultimate contribution will be a huge waste of time and resources. But hey, at least you'll have your 72-inch 3D HD TV to comfort you.
Myu:
How else to avoid the problem? Use a really big screen (in terms of angle subtended at the viewer's position) such as Imax.
Unfortunately, IMAX also has it's problems with 3D-tv. Especially that in the very wide FOV, when you move your eyes focus, the binocular focus doesn't change (of course). I'm afraid many of us are going to keep getting headaches for a while.
First, I don't recall ever thinking HD was stupid, nor do I recall a huge Slashdot backlash against HD. And as someone who's been playing PC games for a very long time, I can say that HD gaming is very important; however, five years ago I did think that developing a videogame console to connect to televisions and produce HD content was economically questionable.
Five years later, with the HDTV penetration of US households creeping up from 1/3, and Nintendo the hands-down winner of the last console wars, it turns out that, indeed, "Not enough people cared about HD gaming" to justify the added hardware costs. Now, of course it's a different story.
Second, will people stop calling Avatar "First-generation 3D Technology?" It's absolutely idiotic, akin to calling the 787 "First-generation Jet Transport Technology", only stereoscopic viewing technology has been around for longer than airplanes have; stereoscopic movies have been around in different iterations for at least sixty years (and some would say over eighty). Avatar uses some of the better theater technology available and is very well shot and rendered, but it is not a "new" technology; just a vastly better implementation than before.
Third, the fact that it's been around so long and still has huge problems should be a warning sign: there's some basic physics and cognitive science that is standing in the way of 3D television being comfortable or viable in the long term. Let's take the Avatar standard: the dream of 3DTV makers is to produce an Avatar-like experience in the home. Something on the order of 10% of the population is unable to watch Avatar in 3D because of nausea, and at least 5% has conditions that make them unable to see the effect. The rest of us emerged from the theater groggy.
It's a huge exercise on the brain, and people don't watch TV to exercise their brains.
So no, 3DTV needs some major technological breakthrough in order to work.
nobody wants this. it's a desperate attempt at creating a need and for once it's falling short.
This is a technology site. It really surprises me people can't see how this is going to go.
HD TV worked only because government forced customers and the industry over. 3D TV won't have the same push behind it. Sure someone will buy it, but my take is that until someone gets rid of the glasses, it's going to remain an oddity and most programming will not be 3D compatible.
What does DVD have that VHS didn't?
DRM prevents copying
Unskippable opening sequences (fast forwarding a tape is much quicker)
The ability to be destroyed by single scratch
Incompatibility (VHS is one standard. DVD is many: DVD-R, DVD+R, RW, dual layer, data types, etc.)
Infinitely higher price (right now I can get VHS videos for free at my local thrift store - sure, it's temporary but it's real)
Smaller picture (most DVD movies are widescreen, giving black bars on my non-wide screen TV)
Harder to record (you can't just take an old DVD and record over it)
Harder to find the bit you were watching last time (a tape stays wound at exactly where you left it)
Less nostalgia (nostalgia has zero value, apparently)
Encourages publishers to re-release old stuff with new junk instead of making new stuff
Easier to lose
Harder for the very young, very old or infirm to use (VHS is absurdly easy - just shove the brick into the hole)
Some movies simply are not available (not everything gets transferred)
DVDs are better for some things, worse for others.
The only reasons I can see behind the doomsaying are sour grapes (I don't want to buy a new TV), elitism (I enjoy films at a deeper level than visual gimmickry), or just plain lack of imagination. I want to go back sometime and dredge up some anti-HD posts... but it'd be easier to just do a text replace on this thread.
Some of us are just a little sick of hearing all this hype about a slightly updated version of 1950's technology that already flopped miserably once.
And some of us realize that the whole stereoscopic "3-D" is mostly being used as a marketing gimmick by the movie studios to get people back to the box office.
The TV manufacturers are eating this up as well- they realize that the upgrade to HD tv's was the first large-scale consumer upgrade since we switched from B&W to color programming. Which means most people who have a 1080p set aren't looking to replace it for 5 to 10 years or even longer. So they're hoping this will catch on enough to spawn some kind of urge to upgrade your TV since there isn't much in terms of increasing resolution anytime in the near future.
But if trash-talking people who don't like or want this tech is what takes the bitter taste out of the Koolaid the MPAA sold you, then more power to you. Bottom's up!
That is the fundamental problem. So far we haven't found a way to do convincing 3D presentation easily and without severe limits.
I mean take just 3D movies. This is nothing new either. Doing 3D movies using glasses to control what each eye sees has been done for a long time. It was colour filters initially. That technology was even refined from the old red-blue stuff to use better colour choices for more natural presentation. Another one, that didn't mess with colour, was polarized glasses. I've seen this at an IMAX theater before and at Disney. Two projectors are used, with polarization filters, and then glasses on the people.
However in all cases you have the problem that it requires glasses to see, without the glasses what you see is a blurry mess. Also it doesn't really do 3D, and you notice in subtle ways so it seems "wrong."
3D photos/video will be all over the place the day we discover how to display it. As soon as we can have an effective display that can show 3D properly, without aid on the part of the viewer, it'll skyrocket. Until that time, we'll stick with what we have.
You have to remember that 2D isn't that bad. After all, past a certain point, and not that far away actually, focus goes away. Everything is "infinity" for your eyes (and camera's) focus. So looking at a 2D picture at a distance is the same as looking at a window... Until you move, then things don't move behind each other, rotate, etc properly. Of course they don't do that with the glasses 3D tech either, they don't change with respect to your view.
When there's real 3D display, we'll see use. Not until then.
Cameron ... "Avatar ... 3D done right"
Avatar constantly cut back and forth between totally different field depths. Just as your eyes were figuring out where you were, bam!, you'd be somewhere else. For me that causes way more headache then anything else.
Directors will have to stop doing that if 3D is ever going to work - all depth changes have to be gradual and/or less frequent.
No sig today...
Uh, dude, 3D without glasses using as standard tech as LCD displays has been around for over a decade. Lenticular arrays and parallax barrier are very old tech by now.
Only really works well for a single person sitting in the sweet spot. That's a reasonable assumption for an LCD display, where use is typically solitary, but doesn't do so well with TV where there's more likely to be multiple people viewing it at once. (And of course it's useless for projection.)
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
... you insensitive clod!
Of course we all know how it works. When the Soulskill's beloved Xbox does 3D (in 3 or 4 years time), it will be the best thing since sliced bread.
The usual MS line:
HDMI is not needed, there will be no 1080p games this gen (PS3 does both), here is out new xbox with HDMI and upscaled 1080p
HD DVD is the future, buy our HD DVD drive. Digital Downloads are now the future it seems (despite the upsurge in Blu-Ray indicating otherwise).
3DTV is rubbish.. Here is our fantastic 3D console....
Americans really are pathetic...
Reading the comments so far, people tend to suggest that the problem is that 3D in a cinema isn't really 3D because you are still only seeing the single viewpoint that the creator gave you, and not simply whichever way you look. This is true, but its also the problem in itself. Films are an art, a craft, in the same way programming, woodwork and painting is. Giving you a virtual reality vision of a scene is not what the art of film is about, its about showing a scene from exactly the point of view the creator intended to evoke a certain feeling or emotion, not giving the viewer a perfect 1:1 view of the actual scene.
Pretty funny joke that's gonna make the industry billions.
Maybe all the non-glasses 3dTV suck, but for me 3D shutterglass works perfectly, the 3D is just as I would imagine. Also wearing glasses isn't a problem for me, as I'm already wearing glasses most of the time anyway. The glasses will only get better and cheaper and are already available as light and slim as regular sunglasses. also with the shutterglasses you don't have the viewingangle problem, which is a major MAJOR problem with non-glasses-based TV's. for me 3D with some movies do actually add something, but watching a romantic comedy in 3D is overkill IMHO.. But I guess some people just need something to bitch about, and it's never good enough.. for pc-gaming I'm still waiting for the HMD's with 1280x720p or fullHD with tracking, as all current affordable HMD's are still 640x480 per eye with crappy (yaw)tracking (ex, vuzix VR920).
It's pretty obvious the kids coming out of school will be drilling these old timers into the ground. They don't have the education to back them up and are essentially children.
I would dare say 3D filming isn't hard in itself. It is the blind forcing of 2D effects into 3D and making them not give headaches hard. The directors are hammering a screw.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
conserding shutter glasses can damage your vision. we will see all you 3d buffs with vision problem within a couple years. so until they can make the same effect without the need for them 3d will not only never take off its not good for you own health.
An unremarkable one, at that. It's happened numerous times in the past, and it's never had any staying power then, and I doubt it's going to have any staying power now. It boils down to nothing more than an optical illusion, and frankly, there are far better ways provide an interactive 3D effect - Like head tracking. That kind of thing won't work with an audience of more than one currently, but I'd imagine there are ways around that. The biggest problem would probably be how to shoot film in "layers" or however it would be necessary to do. Certainly, this kind of technology would be a perfect application for games versus the current 3D fad.
Screw the rules, I have green hair!
...how many times in your life have you sat and watched a TV program or movie and come away thinking "I wonder if it would have been any better filmed in 3D"?
Even if you have thought that, I doubt it's a lot less times then you came away thinking "I wonder if it would have been better if":
1. "They had spent more time writing a good plot".
2. "It had been directed by [INSERT FAVOURITE DIRECTOR'S NAME HERE]".
3. "They had not pounded me with expensive advertising trying to convince me it was better than it actually was".
Unfortunately, a turd wrapped in shiny paper with a bow on it is still just a turd.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I have a better motto for Slashdot:
Luddites. Luddites Everywhere.
I've looked at these 3D TV's in various shops and to be honest, they do look impressive for the 15mins you are in the shop but I'm not sure that I wanna be wearing those stupid glasses when I'm watching bog-standard TV - the only niche that it may be successful for is gaming
Interesting reading on this subject; enjoying the comments.
I actually did some design work on a 3D television solution that does not require glasses similar to Phillips.
As such, I can agree and disagree on a lot of the posts about TECHNOLOGY, but I won't.
I wholeheartedly agree with "it's the content, stupid!"
Excluding the 800 pound blue gorilla called "Avatar", I would offer two other current films as examples: Piranha 3D and Toy Story 3.
I am my own gestalt.
is the Audio Return Channel. Just make a small-ish TV (~ 40") with ARC so I can connect it to my receiver and get the audio out of the built-in tuner without having to have an extra optical cable ... no 3D ... and no 3D price markup either ...
i think the reason for pushing 3-D is that we cannot rip the 3d-data
off DVD or Blue-ray and re-encode it to h.264, Xvid or whatnot and having it still be
crispy three dimensional.
a 3-D capable TV is trivial. it just needs more then 100 Hz, say 120 Hz.
also a 3D capable TV has a better picture for regular 2D data (DVD/ Blueray / etc?)
Not all technology is progress - for every new hardware system that adds to the utility of entertainment, there are several that fall flat. B&W -> Color is not analogous to Flat -> Stereoscopic in any way other than sentence structure. Novelties do, and have existed... The difference this time is the insane marketing push... I don't think I've ever seen the hardware industry try so hard before. Maybe they're as afraid of a dying fad as we are of a sustained one. The next time you hear an industry insider talk about 3d as the 'next big thing', do yourself a favor and think 'Smell-o-Vision', not HDTV.
The improvement going from S-Video to component (better color) is much more noticeable than the improvement going from composite to S-Video (sharper picture)
Then your equipment isn't exploiting the full potential of S-Video. DVD-Video runs at Rec. 601 resolution. This specifies 13.5 MHz sampling (6.75 MHz top frequency) for luma and 6.75 MHz sampling (3.37 MHz top frequency) for red and blue differences. In NTSC S-Video, Cb and Cr are quadrature amplitude modulated onto a 3.58 MHz carrier, and they can in theory use the entire band up to 7.16 MHz, which is more than enough to carry two 3.37 MHz signals in QAM. A composite signal, on the other hand, is expected to allocate only the the 3.0-4.2 MHz band to chroma; otherwise, the dot crawl pattern becomes harder and harder to separate from the luma. But it appears some SDTV output chips use the same band-pass filter on S-Video chroma that they use on composite chroma.
Of course film industry knows how to record multi channel sound. It was just the horrific abuse of 5.1 sound system when DVDs first started to ship. Obviously, Lucas didn't do it. It was some other films.
With high technology, you can do Avatar 3D or some 3D junk which every thrown thing comes to audience face. That is the difference between current Dolby Digital 5.1 and the early DVD 5.1. Unfortunately, some are really fixated on things like "it is 5.1, so lets put music to right/left surround", "lets use LFE on each door sound" and it doesn't change.
Star Wars (in audio) and Avatar in 3D are great examples how to use the technology, not abuse it. I agree. Or, if you do your job well enough, a Dolby A 2nd generation copy could be called "reference record" to test $100K+ audio systems. I speak about Dark Side of the Moon, Alan Parson.
Wow - your post was bizarrely personal and angry. Why do you care about this?
Honestly, my initial post was motivated more by this phenomenon - this personalization and emotionalization of a fairly trivial matter - than by the tech at hand. Why does this have any sort of emotional content?
Why do people post about this and not about meaningless, wasteful computer upgrades (do we really need 500W machines to type letters and check e-mail)? What makes 3d (and HD before it) different, that stirs up such vitriol?
Look, all I'm saying is that I think it's fairly clear that 3d will "win" - ie. fairly soon most new TVs will be 3d capable, and that within the next few years most people buying sort of a "home theatre" type setup will end up with a 3d capable setup (with glasses if required).
Think I'm wrong? Really?
And, to be clear, I have no problem with people not buying it. If someone doesn't want it that's fine. But when people get angry about it, I think "sour grapes". And when people think it's not going anywhere, I think "they don't see trends well".
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
I agree to an extent.
Certainly, 3d TVs won't sell tons at current price points. But the price gap will shrink and then evaporate altogether.
And yes, I don't think the uptake will be as fast as the HD transition (which, as you say, also coincided with the rise of big, flat TVs). I don't think many people will junk their old sets - it'll be more of a rolling transition. When people get new sets, they'll get 3d ones (probably they'll get them whether they really want them or not, because that's what'll be available).
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
I agree pretty much completely.
When I said 3d would win, I imagined pretty much what you've said - people will end up with 3d sets, and they'll use it sporadically (with the heaviest use being for gaming, and probably children's CG animated programming).
My point was just that 3dTVs are almost certainly here to stay.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
Look, all I'm saying is that I believe 3dTV is here to stay, that it will be a winner.
Movie studio's motivation is irrelevant. It's a marketing gimmick. Irrelevant.
The fact that it flopped before? Well, the tech sucked before and the content sucked before. I think it's good enough this time (and will be cheap enough) that it'll win. If you disagree with me, care to bet?
And as to why the studios and TV companies are pushing it, of course it's to sell movies and TVs. But that's really not terribly relevant to the point at hand - the only reason I can see to bring it up is as a rather sad little insult to me - that I'm some sort of sheeple being led captive by big media. I don't feel the need to argue whether or not that's the case, because it's irrelevant and stupid.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
I too was at IFA and thought it was laughable ... all the 3D. Statistics show that way more consumers are interested in web enabled TV than 3DTV, yet the CE manufacturers are bent on shoving it down our throats.
Give me a break. I got a headache from all the fuzzy TV's... no thanks.
Reminds me of a cheap and very tacky' seventies 3D postcard... the who thing.
Give me web integrations not what you feel it the 'natural evolution of HD'. NOT.
I'd be happy if the movie industry lived up to the hype of FullHD from several years ago!
They started with HD WorldCup, just like they did now with certain matches being filmed in 3D, but I'm still sat here at home with 350 satellite channels of SD and 13 channels of HD 720p. Don't even get me started on the fact that of those 10 HD channels, only 3 do proper 5.1 digital sound, most dolby 2.0 and some only do digital mono!! For christs sake!
TV Channels are so hyped up about the next thing to get consumers interested that they can't even fulfill the last project they started 6 years earlier.
I'd be happy if all my channels were in 720p with 2.0 digital sound and 5.1 where the content was filmed in 5.1, and then the premium channels being in FullHD.
"Everyone knows that vi vi vi is the number of the beast" -- Richard Stallman
3D experience without the glasses? Blurred vision, headaches, incorrect depth perception - my friend, you want Ketamine.
I just wouldn't buy one - really don't see the need.