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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.
being pumped in. There was a huge hole in it to begin with. There was just enough hot air being pushed in to somewhat inflate it, like a tire with a leak, so not really a pop so much as that leaking sound.
Now that we've had it for this generation (i.e. 2010) thankfully we won't have to worry about it until 2030 or so.
Or until we have REAL 3D breakthrough where your can walk around a solid appearing image to see it from different perspectives, without glasses.
Personally, I'm sick and tired of small theaters only offering you the 3D version of a given movie. I rather see it in normal 2D, without having to put up with dirty and inconvenient passive glasses, and dizziness in scenes with fast motion ...
At home, for gaming, with a good TV and glasses things might be different, but I'm not much of a gamer myself to justify the extra expense.
"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.
Yep, the film industry is going to keep milking the 3-d cow for a while. What is a 4-D movie? "It refers to physical effects that are coordinated with the images on the screen that involve your other senses," says media analyst and entertainment lawyer James Hirsen. "It is things like moving seats during a chase scene, the smell of gun powder when there is an explosion on the screen and during a spooky foggy scene you are surrounded by real fog." http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/4-d-movies-coming-soon-theater-near-172042434.html
and while 3-D television sales are rising
Of course their sales are on the rise when there aren't many alternatives if you want a decent new TV. That's like saying TVs with digital tuners are on the rise, duh! 3D has some uses, but it's mostly another ploy by the manufacturers to keep their price points up by making it seem they are adding value to the device. Also, why they still put tuners in monitors (let's face it TVs are just big LCD monitors) by default these days is a little silly if you ask me.
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.
I really have no desire to go out and drop a pile of money on a TV that's got a rep for short lifespans and every time I walk pas one it looks like MPEG vomit. Sure they look good when you have all the right sources, but since I sont spend my life building a movie collection most normal content is stretched and full of digital garbage.
My stupid CRT looks much better for non HD content, and if you want HD content it cost out the ass, fuck it, its a gimick for dumb consumers, and a slight advantage to the unwashed masses playing console games.
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"
I like the rise of "3D" HDTV's is because it's a good way to identify a 120hz or higher panel. The idea of gimmicking into the 3D junk itself and wearing glasses, giving myself a headache, all that makes me chortle a bit. But I do love me a smooth motion picture.
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
They look more like cardboard cut-outs placed at varying distances or like layers of 2D images.
That's what "Disney Real3D (tm)" is. Anything "converted" from 2D to 3D actually is a stack of layers of 2D images.
Let's hope so - bring on the 4k2k@50fps hype instead.
I, for one, can't wait for all the content creators and hardware companies to start pushing everyone toward it.
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.
I have never, ever, seen pirated content with ads and logos added (overcompressed stuff I did see, of course). I see ads and added logos only when I watch media I paid for.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
3D content creators seem to ignore the reason we evolved 3D vision -- to navigate rapidly in real 3D space and to range-find. Without those needs, we probably would not have developed binocular vision and a capability to process the resulting data. Cinematic storytelling remains linear. There is no interactive component that requires either spacial navigation or range-finding; so in the context of filmmaking, 3D serves as a sort of vestigial organ to the larger non-cinematic reality in which we are normally immersed.
3D Filmmakers rely heavily on a small set of gimmicks (e.g., an object protruding from the screen plane into the audience space) to exploit the 3D technology. These gimmicks do not add to the experience beyond superficial self-actualization -- "Hey Look! Three-dimensions!" These visual bits are unnecessary parlor tricks that neither advance the story nor develop the characters.
Actually, No, the main use of 3D nowadays is to produce content that uses depth. With the exception of kids movies and horror flicks, hardly any of the new 3D movies has any of those atrocious 'coming out of the screen at you' gimmickry. Personally, I like seeing the depth in a film, Glad I was an early adopter.
I think I'll wait to see what kind of sales are driven by the release of Titanic, the Pixar back catalog and a non exclusive release of avatar before I'd start going on about the death of 3D.
So basically we have a groupthink "3D is uncool because I'm too cool to like it!" here.
In reality, 3D movies are getting better and better. Some of the effects are much more pronounced in 3D and directors are starting to use them correctly. And in fact most people actually prefer 3D over 2D movies.
This is very true. 3D is a tool that has been abused initially (the "shrapnel flying towards you" another poster referred to). But 3D is also the normal way for us to see the world, so when done right, it enhances the suspension of disbelief. However, it matters that you do it right. Just like color could be distracting when you had over saturated hues or bizarre skin tones, 3D can break the immersion spell if not done right. On the other hand, if you do it right, it is transparent on the conscious level but ads realism and makes the story more believable.
It's not just for movies either. At Taodyne, we brought 3D to interactive presentations. We have a kind of 3D interactive multimedia LaTeX called Tao Presentations. In our experience, 3D presentations are something that people still remember one year after having seen them. Most people don't necessarily remember movies better when they are in 3D, but ask any kid in France about the 3D Haribo ad, and chances are they remember it. The same is true for presentations. Showing models or charts in 3D gives them more impact.
Another interesting effect of 3D for storytelling is that you can put more data on a screen without causing confusion. You can put things in front to draw attention, or in the background for things that are less important. You can create true 3D charts, where the depth ads another useful axis. And the Star Wars effect in real 3D is an interesting way to show data (it's a built-in demo of Tao Presentations).
In short, 3D can be a gimmick. Or it can be used well and make a difference. It's all a matter of how you use it.
-- Did you try Tao3D? http://tao3d.sourceforge.net
The other method that will work with any hardware is cross eyed or wall eyed stereo. It gives you much better depth perception and is much better if you are trying to dock/move molecules around each other onscreen. Unfortunately lots of people can't do one or the other (I find wall eyed difficult), or they get headaches. If you're viewing from off-center the problems get worse. Again, most protein visualisation software has the option.
I used those active shutter goggles sometimes back in the '90s while modeling proteins on Silicon Graphics workstations. The whole process was so cumbersome that I just switched over to cross eyed stereo instead.
No matter where you sit, you have the same view. Unless you view a stereoscopic pair bang on centre with an unmovable eye position, the illusion fails when you move your head. To be exact, the illusion is only perfect if your eye position exactly corresponds to the position of the lenses in the camera which made the pair. Victorian stereoscopes were like this: the images were 1:1 positives of the negatives, and the viewers were basically a copy of the camera, but with the positives in the negative position and, of course, light allowed in to illuminate them. (I did some research on this years ago for a thesis.) In a cinema, most of the audience are viewing from the wrong angle and the wrong distance. Even at home, if more than one person is watching, the viewing angle must be less than optimal.
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Except the Pixar stuff. That they could re-render.
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How to kill adoption of home 3D display technology:
* Make any movies that people want an "Exclusive" to a particular brand of Blue-Ray player. Want Avatar? You need to buy this brand. Want Shrek? You need to buy this brand.
Yes, pulling shenanigans like this early on will kill a product. Just like an invite-only system that arbitrarily refuses people killed Google Plus.
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.
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In true Slashdot fashion, might I humbly suggest the following:
If you don't want a 3DTV, please do not purchase one!
If you don't want to see a 3D movie, see the 2D version -- or get creative, obtain two 3D cinema glasses and fashion some "2D" ones for yourself that only show the left (or right) eye image to both eyes.
Why is there this collective attitude of "OMG I HATE THIS TECHNOLOGY IT MUST DIE NOW"? Some of us have been waiting patiently for some of this tech to reach mass market maturity so that we can do cool stuff with it (3D gaming, head tracking, affordable multiple screen virtual reality, etc.).
3D is not really the whole issue -- I fear that we now have a generation techies who completely lack imagination about anything beyond higher frame rates, the latest handheld gizmo, and the right to download music for free. (You also see this type of hate spewed on advances in space exploration by so-called 'nerds' ).
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.
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