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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!'"
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.
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.
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.
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.
The quality of video reproduction isn't anywhere close to that of audio reproduction. I don't think I've ever seen a review of an overpriced digital cable from a videophile perspective, since video reproduction hasn't reached the level where videophiles would start to care about ephemeral qualities. Instead they still worry about things like black level, brightness, colour fidelity, and motion resolution.
Just like how Silver slippers became Ruby Slippers and a Horse of a Different Color was added to highlight Technocolor in Wizard of Oz.
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
We're in the "blue LED phase" of 3D right now, where everyone is using it just because it's new. Once the novelty wears off it will start to be used more sensibly. Although I'd argue that we still haven't reached that point with blue LEDs either :)
Yeah. A couple of years ago at work we installed a new HP inkjet printer in our department. It went into its internal diagnostic/setup rouitne, and a bright blue LED started going back and forth like a demented Cylon. We all stared at it in awe, until it finally stopped. Then one of the guys reached out and pressed the self-test button again.
However, I'd argue that 3D movies have already gotten past the blue LED phase. Certainly Cameron's Avatar was a highly engrossing (both to the viewer and the bottom line) film even without the 3D, and without throwing somebody's yo-yo in your face (like "Journey to the Center of the Earth", which was nothing but a vehicle to show off 3D effects and little else.) Of course, few filmmakers are of Cameron's caliber, and many just depend upon special effects to try and carry the day (yeah, Mr. Lucas, I'm lookin' at you.)
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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.
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.
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.
This is why 3D gaming makes much more sense than 3D movies.
A lot of film techniques rely on changing between multiple cameras, and that dramatic, angled close-up that is so effective in 2D results in a depth-of-field change that's going to fatigue people in 3D. Many games, especially racing, FPS, and platformers, rarely do that sort of thing. 3D would add lots of immersion with fewer drawbacks. There's always room for abuse, but it doesn't seem as inherent to the medium as in film.
I think this could become more evident pretty quickly with the launch of Nintendo's 3DS, depending on how many developers they get on board.
Your brain is not a computer.
Yes, and no. Your argumentation discards a relevant fact; one that you are probably not aware of.
Black and White photos are a proper representation, or mapping, of a 3-dimensional space on a 2-dimensional plane. Adding colour adds information. The human eyes can be tricked into perceiving a rate of above 16 images per second as 'motion', and an ever higher rate as 'smooth motion'. You add colour to it, everything fine.
Over the years, this has been refined, and we can all enjoy coloured moving images without trouble.
Stereoscopy as it is being done, cannot produce a proper mapping. (I gave some initial arguments elsewhere in this thread, so I don't want to repeat myself.) This is why 3D hasn't taken off despite of very early efforts, in red/green, of some generations earlier. The problem is not one of technology, resolution, not even left/right separation. The problem is, and there is plenty of research available if you are interested, that - contrary to the mapping of 3D to 2D - two cameras - even if mounted with the proper interocular distance - cannot map the 3D-impression properly into 2 electronic channels. Therefore, it is physically/biologically impossible to regenerate the original 3D impression with lateral cameras.
I'm not sure your post does what you want it to do, which is to assure us of the value of 3d in cinema. I would even go as far as to say that your post does the exact opposite.
3d within the context of cinema (including this latest attempt) has always looked terrible and added little to the experience aside from novelty; hence it's lack of perseverance in each era. There are certainly exceptions where you can point to a minimal amount of value added to the cinematic experience but these are exceedingly rare and have had minimal impact on cinema as a whole. I went to Avatar and Alice in Wonderland, both in 3d and felt cheated out of the extra money I spent for these experiences and like a sucker for being duped by this latest run of gimmickry that seems to pop up every 20 years or so (and no, I'm not one of those people that "3d" doesn't work on. It all jumps out at me, it just looks like crap when it does).
This latest run, just like all of the others, is just Hollywood trying to milk a few extra bucks out of people.
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MOD DOWN, INACCURATE
"aside from the fact that it's actually bad for your brains (esp. children's brains)"
This applies only to a single type of 3D technology tested by Sega involving two screens placed right on top of the eyes. There is no evidence to support problems with other 3D technologies and no particular reason to believe there might be.
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.
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.
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.
In fact, multichannel audio recordings (and I include stereo into that) have the exact same sweet spot problem, because even with the best recording practices trying to capture 3D (i.e. Ambisonics which encodes a 3D soundscape with spherical harmonics) can only have _correct_ reproduction in a small sweet spot. And yet, multichannel audio is the standard, because it contributes something even if that something is very far from the optimum.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
Though with audio it generally just sounds a bit different / giving effect in the direction of "lower" standard; not terribly obvious when not in the sweet spot.
With "3D" it's just more wrong (sweet spot is pretty wrong in itself...), not really in the direction of discarding "3D" & appearing flat.
One that hath name thou can not otter
It's interesting to compare 3d video to that other technology nobody actually seems to want; video phones. They have a similar time lines, with video telephony starting in the 30's, and going through several waves of hype with little adoption outside the specific fields where they have some specific utility.
Maybe we'll soon see a great superimposed wave of 3d video telephony, coming to an abrupt end when the hobby of thrusting things in peoples faces suddenly becomes excessively obscene.
I don't know about you... but I haven't seen any LONG TERM study about other 3D technologies (and I loked in Scopus, Scirus and Google Scholar).
And the only study made (by Sega) found that it is derimental for joung people... mhmmmm. I will wait thank you :)
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'!"