Slashdot Mirror
3D Cinema Doesn't Work and Never Will
circletimessquare writes "Walter Murch, one of the most technically knowledgeable film editors and sound designers in the film industry today, argues, via Rogert Ebert's journal in the Chicago Sun-Times, that 3D cinema can't work, ever. Not just today's technology, but even theoretically. Nothing but true holographic images will do. The crux of his argument is simple: 600 million years of evolution has designed eyes that focus and converge in parallel, at the same distance. Look far away at a mountain, and your eyes focus and converge far away, at the same distance. Look closely at a book, and your eyes focus and converge close, at the same distance. But the problem is that 3D cinema technology asks our eyes to converge at one distance, and focus at another, in order for the illusion to work, and this becomes very taxing, if not downright debilitating, and even, for the eyes of the very young, potentially developmentally dangerous. Other problems (but these may be fixable) include the dimness of the image, and the fact that the image tends to 'gather in,' even on Imax screens, ruining the immersive experience."
shitty filipino horror movies.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
It generates an extra 3 fiddy per ticket. It works perfectly!
there are a LOT of people with one primary eye, and if the second one works at all, is only used to fill in peripheral data. a LOT of us. it has nothing to do with pinhead 3D glasses with are still as dorky as they were in the 60s. this is a cash grab by the entertainment industry to obsolete and sell-up a bunch of equipment before even the promoters wise up and start looking for the soft-OFF selection in the setup menu.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Vision scientist here ... sorry to have to disagree with you, but actually they are linked ... mostly for very near objects though, so the problems mentioned would be worst for handheld video games like the 3DS.
This 3D stuff is doing great getting people to buy stuff. Yes we know it's snake oil, we don't give a damn, it sells. If we could just sell snake oil for this much money that would be great, but people won't pay $800 for a "full snake oil kit", unless you call it "full 3d graphics and video setup kit", you just don't sell as much. Now take your science mumbo jumbo elsewhere and let us get to work, we have people to fool and orders to fill, ok?
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Walter Murch, one of the most technically knowledgeable film editors and sound designers in the film industry today, argues, via Rogert Ebert's journal in the Chicago Sun-Times, that 3D cinema can't work, ever. Not just today's technology, but even theoretically.
Since 3D cinema pretty clearly empirically does "work" for most reasonable definitions of the word "work", arguments that it theoretically cannot work are obviously evidence of either bad theory or pointless misuses of language, or both.
Other problems (but these may be fixable) include the dimness of the image, and the fact that the image tends to 'gather in,' even on Imax screens, ruining the immersive experience.
Experience, including experience of immersion, is subjective. If a sufficient number of people didn't find 3D using existing, non-holographic technology, to increase immersion when executed well, it wouldn't be a successful selling point.
Some people don't like it, and it doesn't work well for some people (just like all the non-movie, non-holographic 3D tricks -- all of them work well for some people, and for any one of them they aren't comfortable for other people.) And, for that matter, things like shaky camera work -- for some people, that induces nausea and breaks immersion, for some people, it increases immersion and the sense of reality.
Movies rely on lots of tricks of the eye -- whether 2D or 3D -- and the experience of movies is subjective. Arguing that something you don't like that lots of people demonstrably do somehow can't work even in theory is rather pointless.
Deep focus while filming won't change how your eyes must maintain "focus lock" on the screen while spatial and convergence hints scream "refocus!" (and they are there, that's the whole point of "3D" - objects apparently in front or behind screen)
As a side note, many scenes in those stereoscopic toys (disk with ~dozen photos) that I've seen had very deep focus ... IMHO it makes the whole scene, paradoxically, very flat. Yes, there is "depth" of course - but feels non-gradual, like several backgrounds in old SNES platformers.
One that hath name thou can not otter
From this reference:
According to Prof. Martin Banks, Professor of Optometry and Vision Science at U.C. Berkeley, the vergence-accommodation conflict should be kept at less than ½ to 1/3 diopters for the majority of a 3D viewing experience to avoid discomfort and fatigue.
Which means if you are sitting ~16 feet from the screen, things can come ~10 feet out of the screen without you having any discomfort or fatigue. That is plenty of depth budget for most 3D movies. Thus, focus/vergence mismatch is not a real problem for stereoscopic 3D cinema.
Now if you are ~20 inches from the screen, things can only come out ~3 inches out of the screen before potential discomfort or fatigue, so vergence/focus mismatch is a real problem for small screens. Thus personal gaming devices, computers, and televisions will need careful depth budgeting in stereoscopic 3D.
"Super multiview" non-glasses 3D displays (generally with >32 views) where more than one parallax image is projected into your pupil at a time can force you to focus on the virtual 3D image where your eyes converge (this is how a hologram or the real world works, only they have nearly infinite number of parallax views).
Looks like Ebert is really set in his curmudgeonly "new forms of media are trash and always will be" pattern. Guess what -- 2D cinema already violates many of the visual absolutes that our ancestors took for granted. This article complains that 3D separates focus and convergence, but 2D cinema already separated those from visual perspective, something that never happens in nature. We also evolved to have control over the plane that we are focusing on, which 2D cinema takes away. Even aside from depth cues, our ancestors only needed to perceive motion when they themselves were moving, there was no idea of sitting still and watching from a moving camera. I guess this "motion picture" thing will never catch on. It will always make some people motion sick from camera movement or give them headaches from the brightness and flickering.
What is with the timing of this article anyway? The most successful film of all time, Avatar, is a flagship of 3D cinema. Maybe his next article should be "why the cell phone can't work, ever" because calls sometimes drop. Or maybe "why flat TVs will never catch on" because they don't have as deep blacks as CRT.
Of course he's right. Watching even the best-made 3D movies is tiring and distracting. If you don't believe it, try watching two 3D films back to back.
And ultimately, even when done well, it feels like a cheap effect. I just don't believe the added value of having a guy riding a dragon seem to zoom over your head (but not convincingly) is not worth the added strain. Worse, in ten years it'll look embarrassing, and every director cares a little bit about how he's going to be perceived in the future. The guys who put all their effort into only putting out 3D movies are going to end up as marginal curiosities.
So many of the big TV and game console people have sunk so much money into it that there's going to be an effort to push it long after its been rejected, however. It will end up the same way each previous effort to push 3D has ended up. The fact that it's even a matter of disagreement is proof that the current 3D technology will never become mainstream. When 5.1 surround sound came out, I don't remember people saying "it's just not convincing" or "it's not quite there yet" or "it causes fatigue". They just said "Wow. That's cool. I want more of that."
I would love for there to be a really great way to portray three-dimensional space on a flat screen. I'm not some purist who thinks color movies were never as good as black and white. Hell, I still have an old quadraphonic stereo system down in the basement, collecting dust.
And I was surprised when I found myself enjoying Avatar more as a cinematic experience watching a good Blu-ray copy on an excellent 1080p screen than I did seeing it with a pair of special glasses at the theater when it first came out. I could enjoy the story and the visuals without trying to convince myself that it "looked almost real with branches flying over my head". And I didn't feel slightly woozy with a headache when it was over watching it in 2D.
You are welcome on my lawn.
That is factually incorrect. The Wikipedia article on depth perception lists clues used in depth perception, and the vast majority of them are monocular, not binocular.
The two most important things are convergence and the physical sensation of focus. People with one eye (or with one eye closed) looking around at a scene can tell the difference between close and distant objects quite easily up to a certain distance, and less so the farther out you get. It is this aspect of 3D movies that causes problems. They are projected on a screen at a fixed distance, and as such, one of those depth clues (and arguably the more important one at the distances we're talking about) is missing entirely. You can get get away with using distance to create a perceived difference in size when you're using a camera because you can't physically feel the difference between a camera focusing at twenty feet and focusing at thirty. With a physical room and the human eye, you'll only get away with that illusion for a few seconds before your brain figures out something is wrong.
Secondarily, the microscopic motions of your eye are enough to create a limited amount of motion parallax even with just one eye looking at unmoving objects. The natural motion of your head contributes to this. And so on. That, too, is missing from 3D projection.
Finally, the human eye does not perceive things as a perfectly flat image in the first place. The rods in your eyes are much more sensitive than the cones, which means that they tend to pick up scattered light, whereas the cones basically only detect direct light. This means that a single human eye can perceive a difference in focal distance in a way that cameras cannot. This difference results in subtle fringing around real-world objects of differing depth that can provide further depth clues.
So is 3D useless? No. Is it likely to fool someone into thinking it is real? Also no. There are too many visual clues that simply cannot be simulated through projection on a flat screen.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
have to disagree with 5.1, though.
I'm an audio guy (realistic one who builds stuff) and I've gone back to 2.1 sound (2 spkrs, left and right plus a subwoofer). I map/downmix multitrack at the player level and then I get that nice clean 2ch open-standards spdif into my nice clean DAC. my whole audio chain, in fact, is based on pcm linear spdif which is really only 2.0. the .1 subwoofer is, of course, entirely derived and NEVER needed a channel of its own (harumph).
my config demanded I avoid multichannel. why? my audio chain is pure spdif; the htpc puts out spdif, that goes into a EQ that runs dsp code andn its spdif in and out, then into my hardware 3way crossover which, you guessed it, is spdif. only at the end where I get high/mid/low at line level for my amps do I break out of spdif. there is NO WAY to run DTS or dd5.1 into this and stay all digital. can't be done (not affordably, anyway).
so I downmix to 2.0 and get very high quality 2ch left right and subwoofer from that. I play movies thru that system and have no problem at all picking out the various soundstage entities, fully from left thru center and on to right. note there is NO center spkr - the proper left/right does all you need.
not only is 3d a bunch of BS, I don't fully buy into multichannel audio AT HOME. typical homes are small. they don't need more than 2.0 or 2.1. large theaters need more spkrs but you are NOT a large theater! your living room or bedroom is fully served with 2 decent l/r spkrs and optionally a sub.
a clean 2.* system beats even upper mid-grade 5.x and 9.x systems. multichannel is also a 'fad', its just that its easier to 'awe' someone with lotsa spkrs spraying lotsa sound in the room.
less is morer, folks. 3d/2d and audio 'dimensions', as well. simpler is better. let the story be the primary.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Another problem with any fake 3D (i.e. dual images projected on a flat surface with binocular separation) is the fact that the parallax is fixed. When you view a truly 3D scene, your head doesn't stay still; it moves, even if just a little. You're not just sampling the scene from two angles, but from multiple angles. If you want a better look at a background object, you move your head to one side, and the image shifts a little. That's part of how your perception of depth works. Its much the same as why you need more than two speakers to create a realistically 3D soundscape (because we judge the direction of a sound in part by moving our heads imperceptibly). Even the most perfect flat-3D projection system cannot simulate that.
This doesn't mean that 3D "doesn't work", of course. It simulates an approximation of a scene, just as 24fps 2D images approximate it, and B&W 2D images approximate it less realistically, etc. But it will always fall sort of a true three-dimensional viewing experience. And kind of like a CGI rendering that doesn't quite look real (the Uncanny Valley), it'll always fall sort of satisfying.
Until we get real 3D projections. :)
http://alternatives.rzero.com/