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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
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.
Even if they can tell, obviously, that these 1st-gen 3DTVs are a bust, they can't afford to risk missing out on carving out market share right now. Now is the time to make their brand synonymous with 3D TV. The trick will be avoiding being the brand associated with the failings of the first generation.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
Color TV had an obvious and significant benefit and didn't require you to wear silly glasses all the time. 3D is a gimmick that only works well in a limited amount of footage that I've seen, and does require you to wear silly glasses all the time.
Until you can make 3D TVs which don't require glasses and do allow you to show objects which go outside the screen, it will always be a gimmick.
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 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.
Dont equate Blu-ray with 3D TV...
1920x1080p Blu-Ray Discs are incredible. I would never want to watch 720x486 NTSC SD interlaced footage EVER again. I work in post production/special fx, so i'm a videophile.
3D is a gimmick, but resolution is not a gimmick. Resolution is very important. Just turn on any HDTV sports broadcast and compare it to old SD sports broadcasts... Its not even choice, you have to watch the HDTV broadcast because the SD is just so pathetic.
Resolution increases are not the only benefit of Blu-Ray or HDTV... but also improved sound streams, uncompressed audio streams etc.
So support Blu-Ray... get out there and buy them because many HDTV cable/sat providers over compress their HD signals, and anything streamed over the net is equally over compressed. The best way to get a nice high bitrate, clean 1080p video is still on a disc. If we let Blu-Ray die... we let mediocre, sub par quality win.
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.
I've got bad news for you... most of us don't care at all, and will take immediate delivery over resolution any day.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
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.
Buy Blu-Ray? Because DRM is good for everyone! Blu-Ray is shit that happens to have high resolution. If they had some kind of high-res format without the DRM, I'd be all over it.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
I'm not sure this is true anymore. You're absolutely right about the porn industry being the decider in the VHS vs. Betamax war, but you have to remember that this was pre-internet. Do you think the majority of consumers get their porn on video or online at this point? That's not a rhetorical question, I don't know that the data's been gathered, and it's a rogue element that will have a big impact on how this new tech will play out.
Personally, I think this 3D shit is a gimmick and it'll all blow over soon enough so this kind of market share stuff won't even come into play, but it's worth thinking about.
If you aren't angry, you aren't paying attention.
1920x1080p Blu-Ray Discs are incredible. I would never want to watch 720x486 NTSC SD interlaced footage EVER again. I work in post production/special fx, so i'm a videophile.
That's one of the troubles with the world of today. Some people get their kicks just from the resolution of the image. Go to any TV-electronics parlor. People will be excited about the crisp picture, the brilliant colours. Whenever I go there, I am infinitely bored with the crappy movies. And then I go home, and watch 720x486 NTSC SD interlaced with an enormous pleasure; Bunuel, Hitchcock, Marx Brothers. Even Kubrick's 2001 is great fun, in PAL. Murnau's Nosferatu (I guess, not more than 300x200 effective resolution) sends more shivers down my spine than Kinski's remake, even if it were in 1080p.
Because it is the art; not the resolution that counts.
YMMV, though.
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.
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.
Dude, if you saw my mother, you wouldn't make that joke. She's fucking hideous, and a bitch to boot. You'd probably rather stick your dick in a blender than her mouth.
Actually, the blender's probably safer, too.
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.
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.
Of course you are right if you take my words literally, and to that extent.
However, if you care to infer the message, it is about the focus with which movies are shot. There is only that much of funding, and in these days, I'm afraid, the average investor is more concerned about resolution and brilliance (of the shots), than in the artistic quality of the undertaking. And all this 'over-technisised' appreciation of the audience will actually lead to movies being shunned because of a perceived lower technical quality, despite of potentially higher artistic quality.
I personally have overheard people who refuse to buy any non-BlueRay movie, because "Blue Ray is the future". Content seems to disappear behind technicalities, including for the consumer.
And if you please read the message of the OP, I would never want to watch 720x486 NTSC SD interlaced footage EVER again., you might understand my urge to point out what a nonsense this implies. And that one was modded +5, Informative. I was only trying to say, that my primary argument for selecting a movie is its artistic content; not its resolution.
Direct streaming is death for film ownership.
Why would anyone want Blu-Ray to die? I can understand the DRM concerns, but if Direct streaming takes over, you will have lost the right to own a copy.
The worst part of direct streaming, as it is now, and on fios (I'm a very early FIOS subscriber)... is that HD streamed content is heavily compressed when compared to Blu-ray video streams.
By heavily compressed, i mean that fast motion breaks down into compression artifacts. Resolution and temporal quality is lost by overly compressing the footage to fit within the bandwidth allocated for streaming. Blu-Rays all stand out as far better quality when compared.
Just turn on HBO. many of their films are overly compressed in HD. Put on discovery channel's how its made... and watch jelly beans racing across the screen by the millions in a factory and you will see the break down of resolution and temporal compression. The jelly beans will become pixelated as they move fast. The video compression blocks become obvious, because the bit rate is too low.
Now where this lowering of bitrate takes place is another issue. On TV, it can be compressed THREE TIMES before it gets to you. First the production company delivers the TV show to the TV channel, this is compressed, usually a very nice quality version (if they know what they're doing)... Then the TV network sends out their feed to cable providers... and that feed may be recompressed to fit their bandwidth. When the cable / Sat TV providers get it, they then recompress the video again to fit their band width allocation needs. Often the lessor channels get more compressed than others, but overall you can see compression very clear from program to program. Direct TV is notorious for having terrible compression even on their SD content. So much that even negated the entire idea of a digital signal.
So a disc based delivery format is still higher quality because the only bandwidth they have to wory about is disc space. They arent trying to squeeze 500 other channels of video along side your movie... Which is what happens on cable/sat and the net.
I can see how DRM is a concern... but again... digital delivery isnt going to get any friendlier in terms of ownership rights. But atleast you'll have a high resolution, high bitrate version on a disc... which you can easily remove the DRM if you so choose and store on a media server at home.
Digital delivery will always side with bandwidth over quality.... and control over freedom. A Blu-Ray disc with all its DRM, provides more freedom than any digital delivery. They want full control over your media.... So what do you think will happen when you no longer have a high quality version of the media in your possession?