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Comment by sonofjanoh | Hacker News Reader

I'm really curious how people reacted when sound was introduced...then color. Nowadays everyone seems to be a critic and anything you give them they see a drawback to it and sometimes this behavior feels just too forced.

It is turning into: back in the days thing... When actors were actors not animated characters etc. Remember back in the days the frame-rate was given by the projector fellow's hand steadiness and now we can control it. It has to start from somewhere. As for me, Sony did some cool engineering to make Avatar possible and Cameron financed this awesome project. For me that is a winner. I enjoyed the 3D experience a lot.

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I am old enough to remember when our households transitioned from a B&W TV to a colour TV and I absolutely guarantee you that that the reaction was one of unalloyed joy. No "bah-it-looked-better-before" in sight.

The difference is that in B&W you have no idea if the grass is a lush green or a parched brown, whereas in real life you make that determination in an instant.. The problem with 3D is, as Roger Ebert points out, that your brain already derived the 3D based on a 2D image. So the improvement is incremental, if that.

The real issue is whether 3D has a real potential in gaming, where gameplay is frequently first-person, as opposed to movie, where the experience is almost always third-person.

Or, to put it another way, if you can't turn the camera around, you don't need a 3-D environment.

Speaking as a game dev, the current 3D still isn't good enough for games, IMHO. As you said, it's incremental.

It is the case that game design sacrificed precision control to get the 3D look+feel when it was first introduced: for example, 3D platforming essentially has not progressed beyond Mario 64, and that game is still somewhat uncomfortable to "pick up and play" despite all its refinements; the extra dimension just makes everything far more complex. Adding the glasses helps regain some of the depth cues that make complex movement difficult, but then we're dumping on even more equipment, and gaming is already more complex than it needs to be for most audiences. A full solution would need to be convenient and unobtrusive.

Yes, 2D jump-and-runs tend to work better than 3D ones. At least gameplay wise--you can have a 3D look, but still confine your gameplay to 2D (or 2+1/2D, if you have layers or so). However I feel that first person shooters really benefit from 3D.

(And I admit that controlling a first person shooter in 3D with a mouse and a keyboard is more complex than most people are comfortable with. It's a skill that I needed to learn, too.

On the other, a certain level of experience and skill is also necessary to enjoy games like soccer or chess.)

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