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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!'"
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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Sorry to break it to you, but 3D was THE dominant form of visual home entertainment from the 1860s until about 1915. The Holmes stereoscope was found in almost every middle-class household, and the production of stereo cards was big business. Visit the Library of Congress Stereograph Cards site to get an rough idea of the popularity of the art form.
As for 3D movies, there have been five major waves of popularity:
For recent films, you must distinguish between movies specifically photographed in 3D, such as Avatar, Coraline, and any of the computer-generated animated films, and the synthetic 3D done in post-production, like most of the really crappy cardboard-cutout abominations out there now.
3D isn't going to go away, although its popularity may wax and wane. Personally I hope this time it's finally here to stay. There are always idiot filmmakers going to throw things at the screen, and idiot studios who think you can use a computer to make a 2D movie 3D.
There have been less than a hundred movies originally filmed in 3D (not 2D conversions) since the invention of the cinema. It's an expensive process that requires a director able to visualize in three dimensions. How many silent films were made before we got Griffith or Eisenstein or Lang?
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