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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
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.
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.
.
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.
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.
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
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.
Just don't buy a 3D TV. The manufacturers will get the hint.
If Sony can pour millions into telling everyone that 3D is the bee's knees then I can take 2 minutes to voice my opinion that no, it ain't.
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.
Because if current 3D technology didn't get bashed about like the piece of excrement that it is, it would become standard technology. Companies will sell the masses polished turds all day, telling them it's the latest and greatest, and unless people challenge their bullshit, they'll phase out the old tech and you will have to buy the new tech because there's nothing else to buy. Even if you just use the 2D portion, that's that much more you have to spend on a TV and that much more you have to spend on 3D only movies that will look asstastic in 2D. 3D will be great when it's ready, but lots of people seem to agree it's not and I for one don't think that it will be for another decade.
Also, it takes a lot of people screaming DO NOT WANT to get manufacturer's attentions.
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!
The article is mostly complaining that modern 3D TV's require special glasses to watch, which is a completely valid criticism. I'm not sure why you think no one should ever criticize 'optional' technologies. No one's forcing you to buy a Hummer H2 but they still suck.
I can still eat with someone who orders an upsized fast food meal even if I order a regular meal.
I can't watch a movie with someone who wants to see it in 3D.
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.
The folks at Sony have actually seen and used a 3D TV though.
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's not new. It's over 50 years old.
StereoScopic 3d is way over 50 years old, but the tools to create compelling experiences + the market demand is brand-spanking in your face new.
Keep on truckin', tin-foil-hatter. I'd bet money that in ten years you'd be embarrassed you ever posted this. I know DRM just busts your nuts, but it won't eat the media industry alive to the point of making any kind of video obscenely expensive to watch, no corp is stupid enough to pull that kind of move. They will continue to make it hard for people to make illegal copies of copyrighted material, but there is zero chance the home video market will be shut down this half the century, and even if it did, it sure as shit wouldn't be over Montgomery Burns style scheming.
I will be modded down for this because Slashdotters like to tell each other that they're oppressed and marginalized revolutionaries.
If you aren't angry, you aren't paying attention.
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.
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.
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.
"counting how many times Cameron ripped off his VASTLY superior prior movie, Aliens."
Sigourney Weaver
Sigourney Weaver in a skimpy tank top
Alien Sigourney Weaver
Alien Sigourney Weaver in a skimpy tank top
On a planet they have no fucking business being on
Looking for OMFGT3HULTIMATE *SOMETHING*
I stopped watching. I grabbed Aliens and did a thorough 5x5 pipeline cleansing of my brain.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
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.
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.
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'!"