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Has the 3-D Hype Bubble Finally Popped?
An anonymous reader writes "An article at Time speculates that the recent hype surrounding 3-D display technology has finally peaked and begun to subside. As evidence, they point to comments from Nintendo president Satoru Iwata, who does not seem particularly enthusiastic about it, and concedes it won't be a major selling point if the company continues to have 3-D enabled products in the future. He said, 'So, now we've created the 3DS and 3DS XL and also have some games out there that are really using that 3D effect that we can see, from my point of view, that it's an important element. But as human beings are this kind of surprise effect wears off quickly, and just [having] this 3D stereoscopic effect isn't going to keep people excited.' Revenue from 3-D films is also dropping, and while 3-D television sales are rising, only 14 percent of potential buyers think 3-D is a 'must have' feature."
'Potential' buyers, unlike actual ones have no idea what they are talking about.
"OH! THAT SHRAPNEL FLEW RIGHT TOWARD YOU! WOW!" seems to be the main use of 3D these days so it's nothing but a gimmick. A gimmick that needs to go away. Higher resolution displays are beautiful and future-proof. I wish the industry would adopt 4K instead. *sigh*
The main feature I like from the 3-D push was the increased graphics processors in TVs. The sharpness and upgraded video quality is a major plus.
no, we need displays that can produce HDR imagery deep black and high whites.
resolution is yet another gimmick which doesn't contribute to colour or contrast range.
modern tv's can't reproduce true colours, they are seriously crappy at any resolution.
Revenue from 3-D films is also dropping, and while 3-D television sales are rising, only 14 percent of potential buyers think 3-D is a 'must have' feature."
Has 3D technology really benefited anyone but the display makers and the content industry?
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Sure they look good when you have all the right sources, but since I don't spend my life building a movie collection most normal content is stretched and full of digital garbage.
Well, that's what happens with pirated content. Copied, recompressed, ads and logos added, recompressed again, and reassembled from blocks on multiple overloaded servers. Of course it looks like crap.
(That's what most of YouTube looks like, too.)
Yup
From
http://entertainment.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1777404&cid=33478946%5Bslashdot.org
1860-1915 Holmes Stereoscope ...
1920 3D movies in NYC -- unknown which ones
1952 3D movie "Dial M for Murder", "Creature From The Black Lagoon", "Kiss Me Kate"
1970 3D movie Any Warhol's Frankenstein
1983 3D movies "Jaws 3D" and "Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone
2009 3D movies Avatar, Coraline, How to Train your Dragon, Monsters Vs. Aliens, Up, etc.
The clothing industry has the same ~20 year fad-cycle too.
3D has never, ever, improved a movie's story or characters, and never will.
"To me 3D should be about making it feel like you are IN the movie, not that the movie is coming OUT at you."
Pirates of the Caribbean 4. No, I didn't like the movie.
However, the only thing that made me glad I spent money seeing it in 3D was I think was the "first" time I actually saw GOOD 3D cinematography. A few scenes at least. One of the scenes was when they were in the hull of the ship plotting a mutiny. The scene looked like all lit in with natural candle light. In the scene there was round table with just 1 candle in the middle.
And in the scene there was nothing flying out of the screen! No explosions with shrapnel shooting at you in 3D. It was just a beautiful scene. It was filmed in a small space with beautiful lighting, but in 3D you FELT like you were there. Something that watching it in 2D doesn't give you.
There were other things in that movie as well like in the light house, where again it wasn't 3D SHOOTING out crap at you, but you could see all the beauty of the gears and working of the insides of the lighthouse and you just get immersed. Which was nice since the story sucked.
What I would love to see if a beautifully filmed "3D Black and White" movie, something Schindler's List-esque in it's cinematography. To me 3D should be about making it feel like you are IN the movie, not that the movie is coming OUT at you. Unfortunately, movie makers seem to only use to make it look like Spider-Man is shooting is Spider Wad at you or something lame and gimmicky like that.
There simply are intrinsic problems with stereoscopic 3D. The first is that the point of the technology is to increase realism. When you are experiencing that increase realism, 3D enhances the experience.
The problem is that because of the geometry of stereoscopy, 3D in a theatre only increases realism if you are sitting in a rather small sweet spot in the middle of the house; in a home, only if you're sitting on one properly placed piece of furniture. Sit farther back, and depth is exaggerated. Sit farther forward, and it's flattened. Sit to the size, and everything is skewed--cubes become rhomboids. Instead of being more realistic than flat cinema, it becomes less realistic.
This Cabinet-of-Dr.-Caligari effect is novel and stimulating, but it is not realistic or story-enhancing. It's rather like the early days of color TV. Colored snow, and actors changing from purplish to greenish as they walk across the screen, have a gee-whiz appeal, but in the long haul it has to be accurate or it doesn't satisfy, and it can't be accurate if they want to fill a theatre.
A second problem is that 3D doesn't really work unless the picture is so big that you are never looking close to the screen edges, where you get insoluble problems with binocular disparity if any object in the screen image is closer than the physical screen.
The second is that you only get an increase in realism if the director and cinematographer throw out a century of screen grammar, and limit themselves to using lens of one focal length. And, the more realistic the basic process, the more jarring something as ordinary as a cut is. We've learned to take cuts from a long shot to a closeup in stride, but it's harder if the image is so realistic that every cut induces a sense of physical movement. The re-thinking of how to tell a story on the screen might be possible. After all, the introduction of sound posed similar problems in the early days. But adding sound meant adding a whole new sensory modality. 3D is really, at heart, just a better picture... just like Cinerama or 48 fps Showscan, neither of which had staying power despite being a breakthrough in realism.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
You know why I'm not excited? Because the "3d steroscopic effect" is not... 3d.
It's one POV, the very same one I had in the first place.
A 3D display would allow me to get up, which would change my POV. It would allow me to walk behind the display, and look at the BACK of the actors. I could look down at the scene, or up at it; I could sit in my chair and rotate the scene with my remote.
Stereoscopic display tech is no more than 1930's postcard (later ViewMaster) tech. Added to which, it seems that a great deal of the use of it is in displaying distortion -- things TOO close or TOO far, like an addled child with a new toy, the filmmakers just can't seem to get the idea that verisimilitude is of greatest interest, even though everything else about imagery that is popular with consumers is telling them that: resolution, color fidelity, the rejection of NTSC (never twice the same color, lol) for digital, high-resolution detail on reds and blues and colors with those components, instead of the blurry sludge NTSC gave us.
So to stereovision, good bye, don't let the door hit you in the front porch on the way out. Call me when we're going to have real 3D. That's worthy of my wallet. And the good news is, there are already systems out there. Some people, at least, know which way to go.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.