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BBC Gives Up On 3-D Television Programming
RockDoctor writes "After spending several years on supporting the uptake of 3-D TV, the BBC has accepted that people don't want it, and are turning off their 3-D channels following an uptake of under 5% of households with 3-D equipment. I can just feel the joy at not having wasted my money on this technology."
But, I can't help but feel they'll manage 4D just fine when the first TARDIS tv comes out.
...stop wanting stupid shit
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
Fad technology once again comes and then leaves just as fast. In 30 years someone else will rediscover 3D and the fad will start again.
3D needs to drop the glasses to work.
3D or implementation? I want to see Wimbledon in a hologram, played on my coffee table.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Now, let's hope that Hollywood follows suit. The situation where there are no movies to watch because everything is ether in 3d or in the shittiest corner screens is slightly disappointing. At least when I want to give them some money.
I just don't have the glasses.
neglible price difference, you see. this was the right big screen for the right price at the time.
future of 3d is really in oculus type of viewers. for one it's useful for the 3d effect that the screens are tied to your face somehow.. I've watched some 3d clips with it and while I don't really give a shit about screen stereo-display hacks that vr 3d is something entirely different in effect. the only problem with the dev unit is resolution, which makes it unfeasible to watch entire movies with it, but it shows the principle works well enough for movies(you produce a fake screen in vr for the display and don't stretch the movie all over the vision if you were wondering how it works ok, there's sw already that does it for any 3d movie format).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I've seen the imax demo for the Oculus VR. But could you make that Imax 3D :) each eye would get its image for the film and you'd get 3D cinema in VR.
Pointless - someone make it happen!
When actual 3D displays become commercially available at consumer prices, you'll see 3D programming and support all across the spectrum, no pun intended. Stereovision is a cheap, headache-inducing hack, and one thing it isn't is "3-D."
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I wouldn't be too surprised if that has something to do with the fact that 'filming'(whether to actual...chemical film... like some kind of barbarian, or to digital) requires nontrivially different(and not inexpensive) hardware, and you have to decide that you are shooting 3d before you start shooting, while re-rendering an existing set of CG models is mostly a computational problem.
As expected, here's the general themes of the posts so far:
1) I hate 3D. Therefore this thrills me.
2) 3D has always failed. No surprise here.
Well, here's reality. 3D movies are here to stay. But despite the usual hysterical ramblings that insist that "everything" is in 3D, reality begs to differ. Major Hollywood big budget action flicks (ie. superhero moves, "stuff blows up" movies) will be in 3D. Comedies and dramas likely will not be. All animated films from any major studio will be in 3D from now on. Roughly 20% of the films released will be in 3D. The market has shown a willingness to support 3D under these conditions. However, 3D TV penetration is low. TV providers aren't carrying 3D feeds. I actually do have a 3D TV, which I love, but my TV provider chose to not carry any 3D channels. So although I have the equipment necessary to watch TV shows in 3D, I cannot do so. So it's no surprised that 3D TV channels are dying. But in terms of movies, sorry folks, but it's staying.
There is a reason 3D TV failed, and it is never discussed. To understand the reason, you must explore the entire history of broadcast TV.
Now TV was invented by various engineers across the globe, which is why 3+ nations all claim their own people were the first to think of the idea. The first TV services were all set to go massive before WW2, but the war encouraged authoritarian governments to claim that TV for the masses would be a distraction, and so TV had to wait until 1945 to get a proper start.
The stall was useful, for it encouraged greater consideration of TV standards. Indeed, the concept of standards, and ensuring that equipment bought by consumers would continue to be useful, became the defining nature of television services across the globe. Early plans for colour TV around 1950 came to nought, for instance, because the proposed technology had no comparability with the principles of B/W television.
Colour TV only kicked in when engineers figured out how to make it backward compatible with B/W receivers.
Now, here's where we can discuss the failure of 3D TV.
-TV channels are VERY expensive. Therefore new TV channels must demand a large premium (like the early hi-definition sports and first-run Hollywood film channels) or be very popular from the off.
-Backward compatibility allows new channel broadcast technology to be introduced with ZERO market disadvantage
-All of the first world TV services (at great expense and effort) got converted to digital standards, where the receivers were universally some form of programmable computer
My point is this. If, when DTV was introduced, DTV receivers had been forced to implement support for what we know as SBS (side-by-side) transmission, every single DTV receiver would have had compatibility with SBS 3D broadcasts, even when the TV was NOT a 3D TV. Every DTV box already has full circuitry to 'zoom', rescale, and pan the received picture. These receivers could have had the ability to zoom into the left half of a SBS transmission, and blow-up this half-image (which is actually a full picture) to fill the entire screen.
A few lines of code. No change to the electronics. Every DTV receiver ever built could have supported the conversion of SBS 3D broadcasts to an ordinary 2D image for non-3D TVs.
Why did this not happen? Why did the standards people screw up this badly?
The answer is horrible. The people originally building 3D consumer equipment wanted ZERO backward compatibility. They thought if 3D took off, there would be massive profits from having to retool the entire TV production chain. Rather than use the sane SBS format, they proposed complex new CODECs that would require new and very expensive equipment at every stage of the process. They forgot one thing. Without backward compatibility, a very important thing could never happen.
What are the cheapest shows to make in native 3D? Sitcoms and soaps. But sitcoms and soaps, the mainstay of ordinary broadcast TV, would continue to be watched mostly by people with 2D sets. It was ESSENTIAL, repeat ESSENTIAL that TV stations could broadcast any 3D content down ordinary 2D channels in such a way that their 2D customers would not notice a change.
SBS at 1080P (the 'P' is an affectation, all modern equipment is 'progressive') would have allowed this. Your left-eye image becomes the anamorphic (squashed) left half of the picture. Your right-eye image becomes the right half of the picture. 2D DTV equipment simply zooms in on the left-eye image (a function only recent DTV equipment has). 3D receivers convert the SBS data to whatever format the 3D TV needs.
The cretins in charge messed-up fatally. The lack of zero-cost SBS support in all DTV equipment means the vast majority of 2D TV viewers have no way to process SBS transmissions even if they wanted to. The upshot is that 3D broadcast TV MUST use dedicated channels aimed exclusively at 3D TV owners, and this means only premium content (essentially new 3D Hollywood movies) can possibly earn enough
If there is a future for 3D in television, it will be based around non-glasses based 3D displays (aka "autostereoscopic"). For example, see this display by Holografika. Dolby has also been showing a non-glasses 3D TV technology recently.
The challenge of non-glasses 3D is that there needs to be at least an 8K backing 2D display to have enough pixels to effectively get HD resolution in 3D with enough views to have a smooth experience with reasonable depth.
Also for live-shot material, there has to be some kind of mathematical creation of the additional view angles - it is unlikely you will have 16 cameras shooting simultaneously - and unfortunately there often are challenges doing 2D to 3D model extrapolation.
I suspect in the future, we will shoot TV and movies using a 2D camera plus a depth camera (such as flash LIDAR or structured light like Kinect but higher resolution). Then you need the CPU ability to convert the 3D model into the many different views required.
Your title describes it perfectly.
People piss and moan about how 3D is taking over in cinemas. I've gone to the movies about a half-dozen times this year and I only really go to the theater to see the big-budget action movies. And yet, this year I haven't been forced to see anything in 3D (although my group of friends consciously chose to see Hobbit in 3D).
So is there really anything so terrible about offering the option? Obviously, most people would prefer that better movies be made, but that's not something that interferes with the ability of a movie to be 3D.
How many times is it going to take for these bozos to recognize that 3D has been around since the invention of photography and it's always been a niche market? Anyone who did NOT see this coming is completely unqualified to be working in marketing or the entertainment industry. Those who did see it coming merely used it as a means of generating short-term profit by fleecing the uninformed. Perhaps some day 3D will be ubiquitous, but it will take far more than an expensive TV with too little 3D content to get us there. 3D is routinely used as a boondoggle to sell short-lived products, that's mostly what it's been good for. The longest lived 3D product has been Viewmaster, which frankly, is not even as good as the old stereoopticon-- but the only reason it has survived (and barely, at that) is it's dirt cheap and a cute gimmic for about 5 minutes. Most viewmasters sit unused in a drawer for years and years or end up in thrift shops. I'm someone who loves 3D, but as much as I'd like it to succeed, I had no interest in buying a 3D equipped TV with nothing to watch but Avatar and a few cartoons. In fact, I haven't even gone blu-ray, since the value added given my eyesight these days is pretty minimal...
I think they will change their minds later but I do agreed that stereovision is a joke. With the Oculus Rift in beta things are just getting started. Anything recorded now in stereovision can later more readily be converted to to whatever VR format evolves. The future is the Oculus Rift and then augmented reality displays that overlay 3d on top of what you already see. Then a shift hopefully of contact lens display.
And finally bionic direct optical nerve interface which could leap frog the contact lens display in my opinion. A similar nerve interface for the ear but not so much for sound but for virtualizing balance and momentum. And finally either a spinal tap or direct brain implant for tapping into the rest of the nerves of the body to simulate touch. There is zero chance of this not happening outside of the human race destroying itself in the next 50 years. The more sci-fi-esque future will be when your injected with nanites at birth and the implants automatically grow in the body.
Back on the subject of 3D. VR/AR displays make real hologram displays academic. If they ever become reality they will be pointless to implement commercially.
The problem is the gimmicky scenes inserted in movies to show off the 3D effect. When watching in 2D those scenes are still there. And you get the alienating effect of realising the point of the scene is a special effect that you're not seeing.
This sounds like a reasonable and accurate summary. I'll add that I hope that we move to all 3D movies actually being filmed in 3D, as "converted" movies tend to give it a bad name. Also, I hope that console makers continue to make some effort to support 3D, as it can be great for some kinds of games... all else fails, nvidia doesn't seem to be giving up any time yet (so I just need to save up enough to build another decent gaming pc for the living room...)
I keep posting this, but Hugo is another good 3D film. On the surface, it's a kid's movie - but it's really a documentary on the history of film. No gimmick shots.
You're thrilled to have less options? 3D content can easily be downconverted to 2D, just play every other frame. Personally I like having stuff in 3D, though I won't watch stuff exclusively in 3D even if everything was available in it. It's just for special times when I really want to get into a movie or video game. For example, I loved Sony's 3D gaming push. I'm sad that it's over. I liked playing Resident Evil Revelations on 3DS in 3D, and when I got the PS3 version, I was sad to see that it wasn't in 3D for some reason, even though the game isn't that complex graphically and it would have been easy to include the option.
Twinstiq, game news
I wouldn't be too surprised if that has something to do with the fact that 'filming'(whether to actual...chemical film... like some kind of barbarian, or to digital) requires nontrivially different(and not inexpensive) hardware, and you have to decide that you are shooting 3d before you start shooting, while re-rendering an existing set of CG models is mostly a computational problem.
That's not really it. Many of the movies released in 3D have been converted from 2D to 3D, after the fact. Early conversions looked bad ("Clash of the Titans") but newer ones are looking better and better ("Star Trek Into Darkness").
Breakfast served all day!
It is staying, but definitely going backwards in many countries, cinemas are putting on more 2D sessions and less 3D with the popularity waning somewhat. Their is probably enough core people that enjoy it for it to hang around though (I am not one of them)
Well there is the problem of less than half the usual amount of showtimes for a new film because they have to show it in 2D and 3D. I remember going to see Dark Knight Rises and it was so fucking refreshing to have a showing every half hour instead of like four 2D showings in a day.
It sucks imho... at least for me it's more of an immersion breaker than anything else. Get it right or don't do it at all.
3D or implementation? I want to see Wimbledon in a hologram, played on my coffee table. -- "...a system based on corrupt practice cannot be saved merely by tinkering with it" Reply to This Sharehttp://bastcomputer.blogspot.com/">please visit it