Sony and LG stop making 3D TV sets
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I saw Avatar in 3D and while the effects were fun to watch, I thought that the expressiveness of the depth-of-field shots was actually reduced.
In 2D cinema, the viewer's eyes adapt to the shot that the director intended, which often involves focusing on the foreground or the background... once in a while a shot puts both in focus, but it's rare.
The visual cue of depth of field is why cinematographers continue to use it even though it's been technically feasible for a long time to simply make all objects in the shot appear in focus.
In Avatar, the critters zoomed toward the audience and the effect was immersive, but I thought many of the close-in shots lacked the intimacy that good 2D shots can often attain.
3D vision is a perceptual use of depth of field to heighten the brain's ability to discern objects. There is similarly no reason why the human visual system couldn't have evolved to perceive objects in focus over a wider range of distances.
In fact, the human perception of a constant, detailed visual field is an illusion that the brain stitches together from the data collected by the narrow beam of detailed focus directly in front of our gaze.
So I think doing accurate 3D requires simulating the way in which the brain picks out objects at different depths, but this can't be done simply by offering one depth of field for all viewers, since our eyes can't bounce back and forth alternately focusing a near and far object and creating the increased acuity we get in normal vision.
3D film is unreal in that it requires us to suspend our normal method of discerning space, and watching it is something we must learn to do, just as we must learn to interpret 2D depth of field as both an attentional and spatial cue.
Depth of field isn't the only way for a cinematographer to to lead the viewer's gaze. There's also lighting, movement, scene (art direction)... Tricks that have been used in live theater for centuries. The depth issue really boils down to a lack of cinematic artistry, probably due to the lack of experience that filmmakers and audiences have with 3D.
Martin Scorsese's "Hugo" is probably the most artistic use of 3D I've seen to date.
> Martin Scorsese's "Hugo" is probably the most artistic use of 3D I've seen to date.
I'm going to have to watch it, do you know of a way to see it in 3D using a normal laptop or TV?
Even seeing it in 2d you get a sense of the 3-dimensionality.
When you increase the width of the aperture of a lens (your pupil) you decrease the depth of field in sharp focus. It's a fundamental limit of optics.
On a bright day you have a lot of light and your pupil is narrowest, bringing as much as possible into focus.
> So I think doing accurate 3D requires simulating the way in which the brain picks out objects at different depths, but this can't be done simply by offering one depth of field for all viewers, since our eyes can't bounce back and forth alternately focusing a near and far object and creating the increased acuity we get in normal vision.
I watched the Hobbit in 3d and thought it was awful. You had this tiny sweet spot right where the director intended you to look and everything else was a sea of blur.
I realized that I like looking at sets because I was frustrated every time I tried.
I had a similar experience.
That was my experience as well. I find it head-ache inducing. It really doesn't emulate true 3-D vision very much at all and I would personally not pay any extra money for the experience.
Also, the movie is Star Wars so there's no drama whatsoever. Literally everyone in the film is killed within seconds of their mission being accomplished.
If the cameras are further apart than your eyes, things will look smaller in size and have an exaggerated stereo effect also. If they are closer, the stereo effect is less pronounced and things appear larger in size.
It's actually the sense of scale I like the most in 3D (and VR). I don't care that much about things popping out at me on a 3D TV. I much prefer 3D that treats the screen like a window you look through, where the 3D effect comes mostly from things receding into the background. As an example, I loved the parts in Star Wars: The Force Awakens where you had characters shooting at things in the distance and the camera sat over their shoulder with them in the foreground.
There's also another issue here - you can't just take any game and 'upscale' it into 3D using a driver or such. The game's geometry needs to be properly modelled to scale for it to really work. There are other more egregious issues too - things like lens flares appearing in the wrong plane, because the game happens to be rendering them to a separate 2D plane.
These and other issues like them are the same reasons that you can't turn a non-VR game into a VR game with a driver and have it be as good as a native made-for-VR experience (although many games do come somewhat close, if you don't have a native VR version of them for comparison).
FWIW I think the 'average' IPD is 64mm.
Apparently you've misunderstood either 3D (or more accurately stereoscopic) vision, depth of field, or both. Cue detailed HN-worthy explanation of each... but frankly, you'd be better off perusing the myriad of resources available on these two subjects.
My point is that stereoscopic vision lets our brains ignore more information by identifying the depth of interest and ignoring the rest.
Similarly, trying to identify the direction of a sound using only one ear is very difficult, and there is inferior signal to noise ratio available to our perceptual system. The same applies to stereoscopic vision.
It pains me that they aren't just focused on higher and high quality of projection instead of 3d.
[EDIT] Damn those early digital projectors were cool, basically huge light-bulbs wired up to a Centos box with some weirdo DRM shit baked-in. We would receive movies on ordinary hard-drives and plug them in to a central server rack to be ingested and then distributed out to each of the projectors. Pretty often in those days it would simply take too long to ingest and transfer to a screen, so we'd have to cancel early showings of new movies.
Here's a recent example: http://www.cinemablend.com/news/1600740/to-3d-or-not-to-3d-b...
Instead of different polarisation in each lens, like normal 3D glasses, it just uses identical polarisation in both lenses.
Friend: "I can only make the movie after 8"
Me: "The 2D one is at 7:40, but there's a 3D showing at 8:10"
And thus, 8:10 it is. Then I have to stake the glasses off for 30 seconds every 5-10 minutes because the image makes me dizzy as all hell.
4D==time :).
Perhaps a broader reason is that 3d seems to encourage filmmakers to go for visual spectacle over good storytelling.
When it's badly done it makes my eyes hurt after a while and I find it tends to make everything look blurry
I generally am not a fan of 3D, but my theatre seems to light 3D movies perfectly, while their 2D showings often seem dark.
I can certainly see how too much early exposure would actually interfere with the development of the usual association of cues that support perception of distance.
First is that the technology is just plain uncomfortable. The glasses feel bad, and my eyes hurt after a while.
Second is that filmmakers seem to have no clue how stereoscopic depth perception actually works. Objects only have perceptible parallax out to a couple dozen feet. Beyond that, depth is perceived purely by other means. But 3D movies keep applying parallax to objects much farther away. All this does is make them look closer and therefore smaller. The worst example I saw of this was an IMAX film at the Smithsonian about the development of the Boeing 777. There was a scene of a distant 777 in flight which popped the plane out of the screen. The result was that this 100-ton building-sized machine looked like a child's toy.
If the technology can be improved so it doesn't hurt, and if filmmakers can figure out how to use it without it looking utterly stupid, I'll give it another shot. Until then, I'm sticking with 2D.
She loved the experience, so I sat there for three hours watching a blurry movie because the 3D glasses were awful and causing pain.
Never again.
Actually it wont just be diminishing returns, but it will give movies the over-sharpened, soap-opera/sports-coverage style image (and even worse if paired with higher frame rates).
If you live with a technology for long enough, you can start to see its flaws as advantages instead.
Only I'm someone working with 4K video and beyond professionally, not some grandpa tied to the ways of yore.
Maybe take the opposite reading of this observation? E.g. that those tech-savvy people know what they are talking about, and are not merely nostalgic or whatever?
First, vinyl vs mp3/WAV is not the same as 24fps vs higher frame rates, and conflating technical issues (each with their own characteristics and/or tradeoffs) is not really illuminating the subject matter.
Some things are not merely an issue of "technological capability" but tied to human physiology (the eye, etc).
The same way that a screen with 50,000 lumens is not naively "brighter = better" but blinding, or a 150dB headphone is not "louder = better" but physically damaging the ear.
Yeah, 150dB dynamic range is great, but nobody can hear it, and nobody can tolerate the upper range of volumes it takes to reproduce the full range on a speaker.
With color, on the other hand, it's not like that. The more, the better (24bit, 32bit, 64bit, etc).
With fps, again, there are issues related to the eye, how the "afterimage" works, when visual information becomes too distracting or overbearing, etc.
Note also that we, for example, have been technically lowering the resolution of photographs (smoothing the skin) to make portraits appear more pleasant since forever. It's one of the main staples in fashion and magazine portrait photography.
And that's not because "some old-fashioned people like smoother skin vs detailed skin". It's inherently better looking unless one likes wrinkles, pores and detailed nose hairs.
Reality is basically infinite fps. We all get by just fine, and the general consensus is that the effect is quite pleasing as long as the subject matter itself is.
Smoothing skin in photographs is entirely different. That's a selective effect applied before it reaches the display. Using higher resolution doesn't somehow force photographers not to airbrush.
As another commenter said, sometimes people deliberately decrease fidelity for effect, like filming in black and white after color was available. Doing it deliberately in a specific context for one work is totally different from a blanket declaration that 8k is fundamentally worse than 4k.
Extreme close ups, action sequences, camera panning and traveling are not part of reality. Nor do we change camera angles several times per minute in a discontinuous fashion. Cinema is not a full real world simulation, it is a technical way to tell stories.
I get that cinema isn't reality, but the more capable the medium is, the more choices the filmmaker has for telling their story. I can buy that 24fps might be the best choice sometimes. I don't buy that it's the best choice for everything. It would be a crazy coincidence if a framerate chosen a century ago due to technical limitations when dealing with cellulose just happens to be the perfect framerate for cinema.
The Hobbit (shot 48fps 5k 3D)had mixed results using HFR. The scenes shot on location with less CGI looked awful (like low budget early 80s BBC mid day dramas) while the green-screen, heavy CG scenes felt like being in a video game (in mostly a good way). Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (shot at 120fps 4k 3D) looked absolutely horrible, like early HDCam home movies. It was impossible to get swept up into the movie and made an ok script and good acting feel much worse than it actually was.
I do believe someone will crack the code on HFR, but it will first require the right source material (The Hobbit and Billy Lynn's Long Walk Home were not it). I suggest utopian sci-fi or something set in a sterile environment. But even beyond that they have to figure out the lighting, makeup and set-design (and the extra burden HFR and 8k puts on post-production, especially for CGI/VFX).
One element that actually helps make a film feel cinematic is a slight softness to the image. The best looking digital cinema uses on camera filters and/or post-process to help achieve this look that comes naturally from film shot at 24fps.
Younger audiences who've grown up on HD and HFR video games are less bothered by the differences, but audiences usually don't really know what they want until they see it (one reason that early audience feedback is poison to the process).
background note: 20years experience working in production and post-production
As for the rest, I don't doubt that it's hard, requires new techniques, isn't always the best choice, etc. But I don't buy this idea that it's always worse. Which doesn't seem to be the argument you're making, but it is the one I was responding to.
I'm getting a lot of good arguments about why certain videos should be shot using less than the maximum possible. But that's quite different from saying 8k and HFR is just plain worse.
There is no physiological phenomenon that makes low frame rates more natural or appealing. The real world doesn't have a frame rate. The preference for low frame rate is learned. No one ever selected 24 fps because it was better. They selected it because it was technically feasible at a reasonable cost and crossed the line into acceptable fps.
> Note also that we, for example, have been technically lowering the resolution of photographs (smoothing the skin) to make portraits appear more pleasant since forever. It's one of the main staples in fashion and magazine portrait photography.
This is wildly different. Firstly because most things on screen are not human skin and secondly because we've been smoothing skin in real life for centuries with makeup. The desire to see skin as smooth and flawless doesn't mean that people generally want the world to be blurry.
Most, no, just the most important (actors' faces).
Douglass Trumbull, a pioneer in cinema techniques, is developing technology to allow mixed frame rates and resolution. So those panorama shots could be 8k HFR, while maybe the close up shots of the actors are 4k 24fps. It will be interesting to see if this actually works in a film that requires suspension of disbelief. I wouldn't hold my breath for this to reach cinemas in large numbers anytime soon.
All this is to say, it is much more complicated than you make it out to be.
Your list boils down to "use it appropriately and don't assume old techniques are appropriate". Obviously there is a lot of learning the industry would need to do to use 8k well.
> Douglass Trumbull, a pioneer in cinema techniques, is developing technology to allow mixed frame rates and resolution. So those panorama shots could be 8k HFR, while maybe the close up shots of the actors are 4k 24fps. It will be interesting to see if this actually works in a film that requires suspension of disbelief. I wouldn't hold my breath for this to reach cinemas in large numbers anytime soon.
Sounds interesting, and promising, though I agree that it seems unlikely to be widespread anytime soon, even if it works beautifully.
> All this is to say, it is much more complicated than you make it out to be.
That's an odd comment to end on. At no point did I ever say it was simple. I said it's absurd to treat 4k like it's the pinnacle and anything beyond that is somehow actually a loss.
Sorry, I think this was meant for another comment, not yours, as I don't see the sentence I thought I was responding to in yours.
>Your list boils down to "use it appropriately and don't assume old techniques are appropriate". Obviously there is a lot of learning the industry would need to do to use 8k well.
This takes more than a "competent film crew". A competent film crew should have no problem working in well established techniques and workflows but wouldn't necessarily be prepared to venture outside that. If I was directing a production in 8k, HDR, VR, 3D or any edge cases, I want more than a competent film crew. I want creative thinkers and problem solvers. I want crew members who have experience on a wide range of projects, everything from digital video to imax (you might be surprised at how often even the crews of big budget productions have limited experience outside the status quo).
In the early days of the RED camera, the best footage came from cinematographers who had worked in lower budget HD productions, not film cinematographers. The HD crews had already been working in similar workflows, but the competent film crews were flummoxed by this one piece of equipment and even though they could see the results on set, they would still send back footage that was way underexposed and often unusable (and this was often from very well respected and experienced cinematographers).
I believe few people in the industry believe that 4k is the pinnacle. But most do believe that the technology to move to 8k is not even close to ready or worth the added cost, that workflows for 4k are just now becoming standard (the majority of projects are still finished in 2k, although that will change with distributors like Netflix now requiring 4k delivery). And that audiences won't care enough about beyond 4k enough to pay extra. Are you ready to pay extra for an 8k screening? The theaters have to recoup the cost for new projectors while they're still paying off the brand new 4k installs. Oh, and there aren't many cinema lenses that can cover an 8k image (especially since many DPs prefer the quality of older lenses).
There are old timers that lament the loss of film and resist moving from 24fps. But they'll be replaced by the younger generation who will be more open to experimentation and pushing the medium beyond its limits. The industry is driven first and foremost by profits, so once the pencil pushers see profit in 8k and HDR, the whole industry will move in that direction.
But I wasn't saying it's trivial to leverage 8k well, just that if 8k is too much to deal with in some cases, effectively reducing the resolution seems a tractable problem.
Edit: since it's an ongoing theme in this discussion, I should point out that my "just record each scene" description is from a technical perspective only. Making it result in a nice-looking work of art is, of course, another matter entirely.
And it's only recently that mixing frame rates in the same timeline has worked well. 5-10 yrs ago, we would have to convert the footage, typically using hardware specifically built for conversion (Teranex or Alchemist). Then came along desktop software that could do decent jobs converting. Now, if i'm cutting in Premiere or FCPX, I can just drop the footage in and the software will take care of it, usually without issue (Avid still has problems with non-native frame rates and it's recommended to convert before importing the media).
And it's been this way since playback frame rates were standardized (and automated). Projectors had no way of changing playback speed on the fly depending on what frames were projected. Television was locked into one broadcast frame rate spec (29.97 in N. America, 25 in Europe) and TVs were locked into one of those specs. Tapes and disc playback was typically locked into one in the early days, although DVD eventually allowed for multiple playback options, as does Bluray, but the hardware typically converted them for playback on 29.97 screens (pre-HD). We're still limited to what the screen can playback to some extent, the broadcast specs of 23.976, 24, 25, 29.97, 30, 50, 59.94 and 60.
With computers and monitors we have the capability to playback multiple frame rates, if the software allows it, and that is where the current issue is. I can playback different frame rate QTs on the same screen, at the same time without issue. But there is no software (that I know of) to create or playback videos consisting of multiple frame rate videos. Game engines might be able to change playback on the fly, but I have zero knowledge of that tech.
And it would be advantageous to have tech that allowed switch on the fly playback. I'm currently consulting on a documentary that uses source footage from at least 3 frame rates (24, 25 and 29.97). And the editor is cutting in Avid, so we have to convert before import, which slows down the creative process and adds complications to the finishing process.
Some directors still shoot movies in black and white from time to time, not because they think color is inferior, but because they think black and white is better suited for the specific movie they want to shoot.
Say, your cousin has been cooking as a hobby for a while. They move to a bigger house with a new kitchen and can finally get a big spice rack and a deep frying machine. They proceed to deep fry everything and put all possible spices on it. It tastes bad and monotonic.
Your friend plays in a band. They've been gigging a while and got new PA equipment that they say sounds less muddy than their old cheap crap. You go to a concert. The treble is so harsh you can't stand it and have to leave.
Some examples where some new tool is, in theory, better. But it turns out a worse end result because lack of skill in using it.
I find many technically oriented people don't understand this. They point out to some number saying "well this makes it absolutely better". Sure, numbers might be easy to measure. But it's the end result that's important to most people.
Not every film has to be made with the latest technology. Sticking with analog or black-and-white or 24fps is a perfectly valid artistic choice. But it's an artistic choice made by the film creator, not some advantage to the older stuff. Cinemas should be using the most accurate reproduction they can. Filmmakers can then dial it back in the actual film if they think that's better.
The comment I was replying to wasn't saying 8k might produce worse results sometimes, it was arguing that 8k and higher fps would just be worse, period.
Then, let's look at the reproduction part only.
Technically, it might work. More choice in reproduction. But maybe in the real world, movie theaters (and certainly in the television world!) would crank up the brightness and edge sharpening and frame interpolation to make the director's artistic material look totally horrible.
If you think about the whole life cycle of any kind of art delivered to some audience, it's lined with these huge pitfalls at every point.
Maybe I'm obsessive compulsive about it.
Likely a lot would depend on good defaults and good training. If you were as skeptical about people and organizations as I am, you would assume it could on average worsen many movies. The original Murphy's Law and all that. :)
It's not always a naive "the more the better" issue.
Too much resolution can result in unnatural and distracting results -- your eyes don't have that much resolution as when you see a person in 8K in a extreme closeup. It's neither natural not flattering to see an actors individual skin pores, for example.
Similarly, faster frame-rates capture motion more accurately (sharper under motion), but result in a movie that looks distracting and soap-opera-ish to the viewers eyes.
Your eyes can't see human faces 8 feet tall either but no one seems to think that movies are better on 20 inch screens. To the extent that movies look unnatural in extremely high resolution, that's an issue where directors need to learn to use the medium effectively. It's certainly not more natural to see blur or pixelation instead of pores.
> faster frame-rates capture motion more accurately (sharper under motion), but result in a movie that looks distracting and soap-opera-ish to the viewers eyes.
Only because we've been trained to expect films to be a juddery 24 fps experience. If high frame rates become commonplace they'll look commonplace.
Rather, I think the reason why theatres don't benefit from 8k is that from a certain distance increased resolution doesn't have a benefit. E.g. If you ever get close to a billboard you may notice that the resolution of the ad is quite poor, but from street level it looks perfectly fine. We aren sitting much farther than 10' from the theatre screen, so more resolution won't be noticeable given the distance from the screen for most of the audience.
If I move close enough to your face that it fills my entire vision I can see it in glorious 16k, skin pores and all. It's the extreme close up that's unnatural, not the fact that you can see details in extreme close ups.
As with 3d, most directors are lagging behind in adapting their style to changes in the medium. Some things that were developed for low-fidelity grainy film don't work in 8k. Some fight scenes that look good at 24hz look garbage at 60hz. But on the other hand 60hz and 8k allow for speed and details that just produce blurs on old 24hz mediums.
I never watched soap operas and very little sports coverage so I probably don't mentally associate clear images and high frame rates with those types of content.
The same reason we know what people would find too salty or too spicy. Because, outliers aside, humans tend to have the same psychology.
On that note, to hell with motion blur in games. The first thing I look for when I notice a game has it enabled by default is a way to turn it off, I'm not watching a film and responsiveness is much more important when I'm not sitting there mindlessly consuming content being played for me.
Regarding motion blur, I agree, it's way overdone in games, and I disable as well.
Blurring is a hack to deal with the fact that higher res is expensive. Higher resolution is preferable over AA if you can afford the monitor and the GPUs to drive it.
Not really. It's not just some historical accident why we ended with 24fps (or close) and not 50fps or 5fps or such.
3D is and has always been a gimmic.
It doesn't improve the story telling. It doesn't contribute to the plot in any way.
But then, some movie makers remark, 'story' ? 'plot ? what strange words you use.
No in any large numbers. Besides, 3D cinema has been coming and going as a fad for 6 decades now.
But even if it was true that people said that about color movies, people can say the same thing about different inventions and be wrong in one case and right in another.
>A lot of people really enjoy 3D, trying to logically convince them that they actually shouldn't like it is not going to work.
Well, they are not that many to sustain 3D TVs (as TFA tells us), and they have never been that many to make it not be a fad in the cinema either.
In which case, whether some enjoy it is a moot point.
I don't really understand how enjoyment is a moot point. Enjoyment is pretty much all that matters for a consumer entertainment product.
This implies that "large numbers" of people complain about 3D. I suspect this isn't true, and that it's really a very loud very small minority.
> But even if it was true that people said that about color movies, people can say the same thing about different inventions and be wrong in one case and right in another.
Yes, but the point is that some evidence needs to be provided. Since some statements are wrong and some are right, the argument needs to be more than "it's true because I said it."
> and they have never been that many to make it not be a fad in the cinema either.
What does this mean? At what point do you concede that it's not a fad in the cinema?
No, it just implies that they don't care about it enough to e.g. sustain a 3D TV lineup.
>Yes, but the point is that some evidence needs to be provided. Since some statements are wrong and some are right, the argument needs to be more than "it's true because I said it."
The article is one piece of evidence, isn't it?
>At what point do you concede that it's not a fad in the cinema?
At the point it surpasses regular viewing and studios don't stop making such movies 5-10 years down the road?
By observing the typical behavior of one person using it?
Think of a Chinese finger trap. It's been around forever. And yet one person is not going to play with a Chinese finger trap every day. Once you experience it and figure it out there's not much to do with it. That's a novelty.
Not an absolute rejection, but a concern that it took focus away from other parts of the story-telling and wasn't necessary.
He supposedly sabotaged attempts to add speech to Gold Rush (1925) after the actors pushed for it.
City Lights (1931) was basically his ode to silent movies, famous for its endless retakes of the initial meeting with the blind flower girl [1], while he tried to figure out how she could mistake the Tramp for a rich man without words. In the end the solution was simple, and both funny and provided motivation for the Tramps desire to help her: The Tramp walks through the car of a rich man to avoid passing a police office, and so when he stands before her she has just heard him slam the car door. He accidentally knocks the flower he's purchased out of her hand and realises she can't see that he has picked it up. As he hands her his money, the owner of the car comes and drives off and the girl thought he had left without his change, and he didn't want to break the illusion and so walks off without money he badly needed for himself.
It's one of my favourite movies because it masterfully made his point that you can tell a complex story without it feeling like you're missing something because you can't hear dialogue.
He added speech in his next movie - Modern Times - but his character still didn't speak dialogue (but did sing).
It was first with The Dictator (1940) that Chaplin himself spoke on screen: Finally he had something where the speech added clear value by conveying more than he knew how to convey with just pictures.
In the same way I think we will see more and more movies eventually come out in 3D as the industry gets enough experience with it to see where it adds clear value and leave it low key other places, rather than add it to make a spectacle of it.
I think one of the first to do it well was Prometheus. A friend saw the 2D version and afterwards told me elated that it felt like it was made as a 2D movie - no weird camera work solely to make 3D effects stand out etc.. Meanwhile I'd seen it in 3D and been blown away at how good it looked in 3D. The effects were clear and beautiful but not in your face. Crucially they didn't alter the visual language noticeably.
[1] http://www.tcm.com/mediaroom/video/378808/City-Lights-Movie-...
Too bad they didn't put as much thought into the script.
3D as we know it is probably never going to happen. Most movies don't gain much from more immersiveness, and the tech may always be clunky. I've seen some VR movies lately, and I predict they will supercede 3d entirely. Whether they'll end up being the next fad is an open question.
And presence is characterized by lack of nausea.
If your only experience with VR is cell phones or the Playstation 4, then you probably have never experienced presence.
I just got my third sensor a couple days ago, and it has made a night and day difference (there is also an option for 360 tracking with two sensors, but I didn't set that up). But even when I had two sensors the tracking was fine except under certain situations where my body would occlude the controllers. Not a problem anymore after the third sensor.
Article about it: http://www.thisisinsider.com/doctor-strange-how-you-should-s...
When new movies come out, google "should I see it in 3D $moviename" type articles. Unfortunately it's January now; not many good movies coming out.
Obviously, that doesn't help very much since it isn't in cinemas.
Then they had indoor shots that used depth of field, while still using some 3D effects and totally ruined it for me.
The whole point of 3D is you can choose what to focus on! The moment you ditch that the effect is ruined.
But Gravity was awesome, animated 3D movies from Disney/Pixar are generally OK, and I really enjoyed the 3D version of Titanic that James Cameron produced in 2012 for the 100th anniversary of the sinking. (It's the same movie that came out in '97 but converted to 3D. Most of the time, you don't even realize that it's 3D. It's quite subtle.)
Life of Pi
Pretty much every Marvel movie
The new Star Trek films
Star Wars: Episode VII
The Martian
The Hobbit films
How to Train Your Dragon and sequel
Finding Dory
The LEGO Movie
I think using 3D effectively is hard, and most films being made don't have a good reason to use it. It also makes my eyes feel a little uncomfortable, so I'm not crazy about it getting widespread use. Most filmmakers don't have the visual sense (and budget/tech crew) of Baz Luhrman or James Cameron.
The Wizard of Oz was a really masterful tech demo for color, because color was a pivotal part of the story. 3D's problem is that it has been totally driven by technologists and financiers rather than storytellers. If the first big 3D film were The Great Gatsby rather than Avatar I think we'd have a very different sense of what 3D is. Although The Wizard of Oz may be unique in the way the tech manages to serve the story just as much as the story serves the tech.
But there's this thing called cinematography. And when it is done well, it adds another layer of enjoyment to the movie viewing experience. 3D is part of cinematography.
So, yes, plot is important. But if you are watching a movie instead of just reading a book, it is usually because the added elements are worth it.
And I say that as someone who usually reads the books as well.
3D is fun, and films like Avatar and Tron and Pacific Rim are totally worth in 3D.
Why not just listen to radio plays?
They're usually released simultaneously for blockbusters, e.g., 1-2 IMAX screens showing 3D and 1-2 screens showing 2D. For others, they might start out only showing 3D on opening weekend and then transition to 2D as the movies age and move to smaller screens, e.g., Rogue One is still playing in my area but only available in 2D now.
I went to see Rogue One to the only IMAX cinema in my city. First time I went to an IMAX and I didn't like it at all. This surprised me because IMAX is supposed to be such a big deal, but the picture quality was awful: only the center of the screen was in focus, everything else was awfully blurry and dark. It really ruined the movie. Is this supposed to be a premium experience?
I can't wait for the 3D fad to die. It will probably outlast me, however.
In fact, you can test this yourself. Go look up "split-depth GIF", then compare the experience you get from those to a traditional 3D image (either in theaters or from a 3DS or something else that uses parallax to fake 3D). This was the first time in my life I've ever actually experienced the '3D' effect coming from any 2D plane.
Another fun thing to try: go try and hit a baseball, catch a ball, whatever. You may notice you are not very good at this, even with a fair amount of practice. These small objects don't give off depth cues your brain normally uses since it can't rely on stereoscopic vision, the lack of shadows, small change in relative size and a lack of other objects to use for depth positioning can make this a difficult if not almost impossible task for someone with amblyopia.
Want to know how I know all of this? Because I've done all of this, my left eye is horrifically bad and has been since the day I was born (80/20 in the left eye, 40/20 in the right), and even after TWO strabismus surgeries it decided to misalign itself again and I've suffered from occasional double vision ever since.
If you're still relatively young (20's or early 30's) you can check out vision therapy, there's been a lot of great success rates on retraining the brain to properly integrate the information from both eyes that will allow you to see "normally" and likely remove these issues. Personally I've opted not to because at 25 years old I really have no desire to change how I perceive the world (it's not a comforting thought, especially since once you've retrained your brain you can't exactly undo it).
They had a preview for The Walk and that preview showed the true depth of 3D.
The quality of projections in all the theaters that I visited is year to year worse. Somehow they switch to constantly worse technologies for 3D? I suspect the older ones but only on a few places had higher FPS than these done now? Now is watching the movements annoying, I see the objects move like in the strobolight -- not smooth at all.
Depending on where you live, not really.
What we're really seeing is that people don't like to lose something they had previously, regardless of how small. People who prefer 2D really are having fewer showings available, but the trade-off is choice, and allowing other people to actually experience their preference, which is a good thing.
Very often the only 2D option is the dubbed version—because kids, I guess—if any, because the other rooms are already split between subtitled and dubbed.
3D is a good differentiator, and allows for a price raise that otherwise doesn't appear justified.
I personally think 3D sucks because it is a gimmick that affects the cinematography of a movie. Even if you can see a movie in 2D, you are consuming a product that was creatively compromised by filming it in 3D. I've seen a lot of films in both 2D and 3D, and I do appreciate the gee-whiz factor of 3D for some kinds of movies, but it's really unnecessary for movies where spectacle is not the primary consideration.
Plus, 3D is really immersion breaking. When you are watching a 2D movie directors force you to look at a certain part of a shot by using a shallow depth of field. In a 3D movie, this results in a really disorienting effect where something in the foreground can be out of focus, and despite trying to focus your eyes on it, it will continue to be out of focus, while the part of the image that is further away is still in focus.
Realism isn't the goal of movies, telling a story is, and 3D gets in the way of telling that story.
Mind you, for movies where the majority of many shots are CGI-composited (or for works that are just plain-old digital animation in their entirety), the 3D is "free": you have a 3D master whether you want one or not, and any 2D release is a post-processed edit.
> In a 3D movie, this results in a really disorienting effect where something in the foreground can be out of focus, and despite trying to focus your eyes on it, it will continue to be out of focus, while the part of the image that is further away is still in focus.
I've always wondered whether this problem could be "solved" with eye-tracking in VR. The gear would project a ray from your pupil to the image, hit a pixel, map it back through the projection matrix to the surface of an object in the scene, and then dynamically adjust the depth-of-field so that that part of that object (and everything else at the same depth) was in focus.
It's not free because although the assets are in 3D, the final render still needs to be done, and for stereo you need to render every frame twice, once for each eye. When I was working on animated features the extra production cost for stereo was ~10% of the total production budget.
That's because large numbers of people like to watch 3D versions in preference to 2D, especially for movies like those in the Star Wars series (less so for, say, romcoms, which is why you don't see them in 3D at all.)
Nobody's trying to oppress you personally or trying to control your experience out of principle. (I hope.)
3D is typically enhanced price, and serves as a way of extracting more money from the segment of the population willing to pay more to see movies in the theater. Without 3D pulling in that segment, the profit-maximizing 2D ticket price would probably be higher.
I'd pay the 3D fee to get in the most modern 2D theatre experience possible. I also get frustrated that 2D showing times can be quite limited if I want to see it on a system better than what I have at home.
[1] Not a joke: on Amazon you can find polarized glasses that work with most theaters where both lenses are polarized to just a single camera (left 2D and right 2D). I've got a friend that experiences motion sickness at 3D showings that uses them to see movies where everyone else wants to see 3D. One of the lesser utilized but awesome tools with some of the home 3D TVs (like my LG) is to have one player with left 2D glasses and the other with right 2D glasses and play a "full screen" coop game.
That's a very friendly way to put it :)
But I don't know your friends.
It depends on the personalities of everyone involved, the strengths of their feelings on the matter, etc. There's a lot of variability involved.
I'll do something I fear will be boring or go to restaurant I don't love for my friends. But I won't take a 3D headache or eat at a restaurant that has nothing but stuff I'm allergic to, because headaches suck. (Turns out both my clauses converge on that "because".) At the risk of channeling $STEREOTYPICAL_MOM, are people who'd ask that of you really your friends?
> At the risk of channeling $STEREOTYPICAL_MOM, are people who'd ask that of you really your friends?
They don't know, because I don't tell them. Otherwise, they'd bend over backwards to accommodate me, which would make me more uncomfortable than the physical pain does.
Source: Myself, a dad that only sees movies a couple times a month during a very limited time period when the babysitter is available
My experience was that 3D IMAX is way worse than regular 3D (which I'd also rather not watch).
That said I'd still prefer 2D.
Couldn't agree more.
It's the same mentality that makes people declare that "[arbitrary tv show] should've been cancelled long ago!"; or what a travesty it is that [arbitrary beloved IP] is getting a sequel/remake/reboot.
If the Simpsons runs for fifty seasons, it doesn't undo the first ten.
If they reboot Batman a dozen more times, it doesn't keep you from thinking that Adam West was the best Batman.
And to categorize 3D movies as simply a fad totally disregards works for which 3D was an integral part of the creative vision, e.g. Avatar, Gravity, Love.
There's simply no good reason to discourage anyone from contributing anything creative to the culture, even if you question their motives.
Batman needs some comedy, and it needs to be proud of it, and there has been very little of that in the reboots. In fact, with the exception of a few scenes in the Michael Keaton version (which is my favourite in fact), I've only really seen it in Suicide Squad, and it only had about 30 seconds which included Batman.
The Adam West version is a comedy show, and it does a pretty good job at it.
That said, I like the campier interpretations of the TV show and Burton/Keaton but I also like the grittier Miller/Mazzuchelli Year One and Nolan/Bale interpretations, too. There's a proud tradition of both, and they complement each other (one interpretation playing straight man to the other, if you will).
I don't know about that, there are very good reasons not to, in my opinion. It's the same reason we don't build on top of the gaza pyramids, or replace the mona lisa with a more modern version.
We like to preserve the legacy of things, and when you pollute it with things not in the original design it's easy to end up reshaping what it means and diluting its history.
Making sequels in no way affects the integrity of the original.
They are wholly different circumstances.
Sequels absolutely can affect the integrity of the original by expanding the universe of the plot in ways that it's original design never intended or the way it was originally perceived.
Countless Shakespeare productions and remakes and reinterpretations don't diminish the original form.
That statement does nothing but detract from the conversation. Of course I'm not obliged to pay attention to any of them. I'm not making the generalization that all sequels are bad.
If you think that some new works expand the universe in a stupid direction, there's no reason you can't pretend they don't exist and still derive the same meaning from your favorite works.
Disney does this as a matter of policy.
I certainly don't think that the Luxor hotel and casino in Las Vegas diminishes the legacy of the Great Pyramids in any way. In fact, I think it's really interesting that they were able to use an ancient form to achieve something architecturally unique from a modern standpoint. It allowed them to create an uncommonly large open lobby area, which is really cool to see, and wouldn't have happened if someone had said 'no pyramids, pyramids have been done.'
A remake/reboot is certainly nothing like replacing the Mona Lisa. It's more like a Banksy type person painting their own take on the Mona Lisa on a concrete wall or something.
Do you think that no artist after da Vinci should ever reference the Mona Lisa in any way? Because derivative works were being made by prominent artists before da Vinci even considered his finished. In fact, the famous Mona Lisa arguably wasn't even the only version of the Mona Lisa that da Vinci himself contributed to.
'Meaning' is extremely personal and dependent entirely on the context within which a work is received. No work will ever hold the exact same meaning for two individuals. Furthermore, a work's meaning to a particular individual is likely to evolve continuously throughout their life.
To discourage derivative works is like saying that you don't want to have to consider that alternate meanings are even possible.
Derivative work is a little different than building a sequel though. A sequel may stand alone on it's own, but it also can take away from the original intention of it's prequel because it usually further builds out the universe or plot that took place in the original.
Movie producers often reach for sequels because they are guaranteed cash grabs and prop them up with nothing more than a shallow plot and a few A-list celebrities. To many, this takes away from the intent and meaning of the original.
Look at all the superhero origin stories that have come out lately, and summarize to yourself the story in the movie, without including any of the establishing. Even in the best ones... in fact, to some extent, especially in the best ones... the story itself is quite simple.
The sequel will have a chance to spread its wings much more. The fact that so many fail to do so is... well... an interesting discussion on its own. But the really great sequels are often movies that had to be sequels, because they told a story too big to also have 45-75 minutes of establishing in there with them.
Like jackbooted thugs from Fox show up on your doorstep and say "we heard you write comedy; you're coming with us."
There's no shortage of talented creative people, and contracts usually don't last forever.
Yes it does, absolutely.
That's like saying an awful ending to a movie can't ruin the whole movie, people can still enjoy the beginning.
It's totally possible to ruin people's memories and nostalgia.
Recently, I've been watching Sherlock. After doing some reading, I learned that Sherlock Holmes is the most portrayed character ever, "with more than 70 actors playing the part in over 200 films" [1]. Talking with a work mate, he said his favorite portrayal was Jeremy Brett. I also learned that the original works are in the public domain, which is probably why it is so often used as source material.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_Holmes#Adaptations_in...
It'd be great if they had both!
This is not true. Every 3d movie takes up IMAX screens that could be used to show 2dd versions of the movie. The 3d IMAX version has less visual fidelity than the 2d version and actively makes people feel sick.
Because movie theaters believe they can charge more for 3d often 3d movies take up every single IMAX screen and do not allow people to enjoy the best possible experience.
3d is a stupid gimmick and ruins movies.
Some 3D movies are great, like Avatar that actually shot things using 3D cameras. In other movies, like Captain America, they add the 3D in post and it looks like garbage. I appreciate a 3D movie done well, but too many are half-assed.
The real problem for me is if I can't see it in IMAX I'd rather see a film in not-3D but because the theaters have a hefty 3D surcharge, they're not interested in running the 2D version. I'm paying a ridiculous tax for something I don't even want, and I have no options other than going way out of my way to avoid it.
Maybe you like everything in 3D. That's fine. There are a lot of people that don't care for it and yet are forced into paying for it for lack of options.
So yeah, go away you stupid gimmick.
As an aside, this reminds of the prime example of "people are so stupid you can't even imagine": I checked some epilepsy forum when Avatar came out because I suspected it's dangerous and yes, people said it is not advisable and some got auras and some even seizures from the movie so I decided 3D movies are not for me. Not everyone though -- there was someone who posted "yeah, I saw the warnings here and went to see Avatar 3D and got a seizure" and I am like "you can't be real".
Edit: to whoever downvotes this, I had seizures when I was 20 years old. Despite numerous examinations including sleep deprived EKG, CT, MRI they never found out what causes them. So if you are downvoting this because I sound like we do not know what causes seizures then you are either ignorant (because we indeed do not know and I am the damned walking example) or have knowledge I really badly need. If the latter then please share links to new neuro research which will help me and my neurologist to decide whether I need to stay on medication or not. I would be glad to stop after two decades.
Each of your eyes gets a half of the light available to them both before and after.
3D at home... on a smaller screen... just doesn't work as well as a spectacle.
It was plain old 2D except for a handful of scenes where they flashed an icon in the corner to tell you to put on your glasses. You put them on for a minute, saw some cool 3D effect in an action scene, and then you took them off before you got a headache and before it affected the rest of the movie.
I imagine smaller chains opening new locations may pass on adding 3D capability to their theatres in future, however many may continue showing 3D films on the equipped screens if only to justify the extra $15k/cinema in equipment they were hustled into buying while making their mandatory 3D conversion.
I have seen a lot of 3D movies on LG OLED sets (Gravity, Mad Max), and it's remarkable. Much better than 4K UHD. With the latest LG OLEDs, you get 1080p per eye, bright smooth motion, and the passive glasses are cheap, lightweight, and you don't have to charge them.
All 10 of them?
>I have seen a lot of 3D movies on LG OLED sets (Gravity, Mad Max), and it's remarkable. Much better than 4K UHD. With the latest LG OLEDs, you get 1080p per eye, bright smooth motion, and the passive glasses are cheap, lightweight, and you don't have to charge them.
I find that 3D is a gimmick even at the cinema, even more so from a TV.
Edit: Here's a decent resource. Still doesn't talk about a hardware chip but rather about multiple LCD screens or blacking glasses that are synced with the TV. Both options sound rather expensive.
I assume passive 3D required some hardware to support it too, and both required hardware with firmware that could support the formats and settings required
In theory that could also be added as aftermarket modification.
If the screen is fed with an interlaced 3d stream and the screen firmware/hardware allows 1:1 pixel playback it doesn't need to know if the content is 3d or not.
If they actually do fully do away with 3D sets, I'll be looking to nab an older model when they drop in price.
Last year I bought a 55” 1080p LG OLED and on a lark, picked up a 3d blu-ray to see how it looked. Jeez, I was totally blown away! So much better than the movie theatre “Real 3D” while using the same passive glasses. A ridiculously beautiful 3d effect that was easy on the eyes. Just amazing. I started to stockpile whats left of the 3d blu-rays being produced. Thankfully, the 3d blu-ray editions tend to have all of the 2d versions as well, so it’s not the end of the world.
Favorite 3d blu-rays: Avatar (omg, just incredible), Inside Out (hankies required). 3d animated movies are the best.
I will go over and add my name to the petition. Home 3d is great.
The petition page quotes LG as saying "3D is just no longer a big selling point." And somehow, curved TVs are a big selling point? I'm not sure if I'll ever understand that one. Even 4K is a pretty laughable selling point at the sizes/distances experienced by most home viewers.
I also tried to get some 3d games working because I thought it might be better than movies, but it was decidedly worse. Like, really bad. Headache and nausea inducing in mere minutes bad. This is probably the reason that hardly any games support 3d tvs any more.
Likewise, the 3D in the Doctor Who Day of the Doctor special, which I saw in theatres, the 3D was well done because they used it in specific spots and in subtle ways.
3D should be an accent, not a centrepiece. Some movies get this right, lots get it wrong.
VR is hard for most directors to handle. Steven Cameron (Avatar, Titanic) likes pans over detailed backgrounds. His 3D is done with a light touch - nothing ever appears in front of the screen plane. That looks good, which is why "Avatar" launched the 3D boom. Cameron wants higher frame rates so those long pans don't have strobing.
Too many other directors use 3D to pretend they're doing a roller coaster simulator. They put stuff in your face to make people feel they go their money's worth viewing the 3D version. That's just painful.
Next to go down: VR headsets. The technology has been working for years now and there's still no killer app beyond 3D shooters.
I disagree. It's niche, but it makes 3d movies feel like a joke. Most technology pieces have been about the sum of their parts anyways, not a single killer app. Certain things stand out like Zelda or Mario for nintendo, but Sony & Microsoft have done well by having a number of good games to buy. While VR is a set of shorter experiences, more and more keep coming up. A number outside of the shooter space.
VR headsets. The technology has been working for years now
and there's still no killer app beyond 3D shooters.
The first time I saw the Warcraft trailer in front of a 3D movie I got extremely irritated when some stupid Orc stood up in front of the screen and I instinctively tried to lean over to see around him.
It seems like it's a neat effect but, like many things, it should be used only when it adds significant effect or impact (imho never).
Edit: There's also little proof that 3D TV failed because wearing the glasses was awkward. I can only compare it to 3D cinema, which is basically worthless. Avatar is still the only movie I've seen where it worked, for every other one it was just money paid for nothing.
They don't have to be similar technologies, just comparable in that they're fads (which lot of us feel, and time will prove -- check back in 5 years).
It's similar to 3D TV in that it presents content in a better way that nobody asked for, and nobody ever found a way to massively leverage the tech that truly felt natural.
3D content ended up falling into two camps:
- Films that are largely the same experience as their 2D counterparts. You barely notice that the 3D is there, and after the fact you'd be hard pressed to claim that the 3D made the experience substantially better in any way. A lot of VR tech demos fall into this category - things that are "well, that's very cool, but..."
- Films that exploited the 3D technology by throwing baseballs at your face, having characters literally fly out of the screen, etc, to fully drive home the 3D effect - but ultimately all of them were gimmicky and done for the sake of showing off the tech. VR has a boatload of these, where the entire experience is about the spectacle of VR, rather than VR tech being the vehicle to some more substantial experience.
3D films never found a way to integrate the tech in a way that felt substantial, and VR is struggling with the same. Some niche VR categories (see: cockpit games like driving and flight sims) have certainly embraced VR, but more generally VR is dominated by tech demos and games that simply don't feel like a meaningful upgrade over their 2D counterparts.
VR is a (very cool) solution looking for a problem, and IMO in that way it is similar to 3D TVs, and unless it finds its killer problem to solve, will suffer the same fate as 3D TVs.
3D just doesn't add that much to videos. It can add a little bit to the immersion, but we're already good at picking up other depth cues. I can think of videos which could potentially be better with 3D, but I can't think of any video experience you fundamentally couldn't have without 3D.
With VR, it's pretty easy to come up with things it can do which fundamentally can't be done without it. Flight sims, as you mention, are a big one that come to mind. Being able to freely look around is huge. I think this stuff is going to become a really useful tool in learning to fly. Simulation is already proving really useful even without VR, but seeing everything through a fixed monitor is severely limiting. Being able to look around to get the same visual cues you'd get in the real airplane will be a big improvement.
Obviously, that's fairly niche, but a really useful technology that greatly appeals to a few is different, and much more interesting, than a not-very-useful technology that vaguely appeals to many.
I'm skeptical about some of the wacky stuff people predict for VR, like using it to hang out with friends or watch movies together or whatever. But if you get away from areas where you just do the same old stuff a little bit better, there do seem to be some properly interesting things it can do.
No, that's where VR is so different from 3D TV. Nobody was making 3D TVs in their basement. But people have wanted VR for so long that they have been hacking together their own VR headsets. I had been experimenting with using smartphones in cardboard boxes for years before Google Cardboard came out. The significance of Google Cardboard is that it signaled a moment when smartphone hardware was finally "good enough" to do it.
And while Google Cardboard is of course not a great experience, in a lot of ways it's still the basis of the core technology behind most of the other headsets. The Rift and the Vive wouldn't have their relatively high DPI display modules if it weren't for the advances in display module tech built for smartphones. The original Rift DK1 and the Gear VR wouldn't have their motion tracking tech if it weren't for the advancements in high-frequency, low-cost IMU technology built for smartphones.
And the problem is not that VR does not have a cool solution for any problems. It has plenty of those. You just don't personally care about the problems that VR solves. And that's fine, we all have our different interests. But don't assume that means that nobody wants VR.
On the contrary, I do. I have the Oculus Rift and the Touch controllers, and I enjoy trying all the content there is. I also love VRs and flight sims - but I've been a flight sim nerd since I was a kid...
The problem is that I don't think the vast majority of the world cares about the problems that VR solves, and that's precisely the similarity with 3D TVs.
I still know some people who love their 3D TVs and watch as much content in 3D as they can get their hands on, but ultimately these people are a very small market, and manufacturers have decided this market isn't serviceable profitably. VR faces the same issue - the places where it's truly well integrated are very niche, and despite multiple attempts at broader appeal, has yet to break out.
Heck, you say mostly the same:
> "But people have wanted VR for so long that they have been hacking together their own VR headsets."
"People" being a vanishingly small community of makers and tinkerers.
VR has been a dream for a long time for many people - especially in the hacker community - but it was never a mainstream desire. In the same way people have been hacking stereoscopic tech together for a long time before 3D TVs, and yet 3D TVs still failed in the mainstream.
VR will always have a place in some niches - the issue here is if major hardware manufacturers will be able to support this niche at the level they are doing right now. The Rift and the Vive are both incredible leaps in VR tech, but both are predicated on the expectation that VR goes mainstream in some major way. Both products will not be sustainable if VR continues to be a very small market like it is right now.
Having the hardware be something totally different may well be helpful too. A 3D TV is just a regular TV with a weird feature tacked on. It's hard to justify a higher price, so there isn't much incentive to add that feature. VR headsets are seen as a totally different technology, so their price can be set independently.
This isn't true, though. Developers have found that existing genres are incredibly difficult to adapt into VR. First-person games have had the most trouble adapting to VR because moving the player without a corresponding real-world movement is disorienting.
The abstraction of moving with a controller actually made FPSes even possible - what we've found is that allowing free-look with a VR headset and movement with a joystick is basically impossible to implement well.
If you're looking to your left and push up on your joystick, should the player move in the direction you're looking? Or in the direction of your torso? Worse, having the player move through the world even though the player is physically still causes nausea and disorientation in even seasoned VR users.
First-person game devs have largely settled on teleportation as the replacement - you can't move the player around like you do in a normal game, you can only teleport them to fixed positions. This has solved the disorientation problem at the cost of immersion - most games don't have a convenient in-world explanation for why the player gets to teleport around - and also removes dimensions of gameplay (teleportation makes dodging enemy attacks stupidly easy, after all).
Some modders have shoved VR support into traditional FPSes, and for all of the above reasons these are unplayable. Some have altered their gameplay to support teleportation, and some have disallowed player movement at all (see: Superhot VR). In any case, adapting games to VR is really hard, and in many ways controllers/keyboard/mice were much easier.
I'm sure there are plenty of other uses, but it will probably be a while before the tech is good enough to be convenient for these uses.
Similarly, telemedicine was a thing 20 years ago and it does work in some cases, just like robotic surgery with the DaVinci system. But most people want to have a doctor diagnose them and then perform whatever procedures might be necessary, and especially the wealthy customers hospitals really want tend to prefer doing that with a human. So most of the value add comes from the surgeon rather than the surgery. (Even in oncology, bedside manner is worth a tremendous amount -- to the tune of 8-figure restricted endowments for colleagues of mine)
Speaking as someone who participated in said research, I've seen this cycle before. Maybe it will end differently. But I personally am skeptical. YMMV.
Imagine if you were buying a fixer upper, and hiring someone to renovate it. It would be pretty cool if you could see their design for the renovation in VR and make sure it feels good before investing in the house and the work.
Which nonetheless have the common side effect of nausea in a non-negligible fraction of the population...
VR was workable 20 years ago; I was working on it at that time. Thing is, it only provides a tangible benefit for certain use cases, and most people don't derive enough value from those use cases to pay extra for it.
Argue all you wish, but both 3D and VR are now on their 3rd or 4th hype cycle, and the evidence from previous cycles is that people just don't value them enough to justify the cost.
"Workable", as far as I know basically everyone who used VR then and used it now agrees that there is a big difference due to technological advancements.
The argument that people don't pay extra for it is also only relative, because that's a function of the price they have to pay extra. I'm pretty sure if a high-end VR headset would cost 30 Euro many more people would buy it, as I'm sure more people would buy it for the current price point if the tech would be more advanced.
To sum it up with an comparison: Your argument reminds me of all the people who said a file hosting service will never be something people want as others had failed before and it is a useless idea. Dropbox proved the opposite.
In the end no one knows the future, but at least we now have had a fruitful discussion with arguments for both positions.
Predictions are difficult when they concern the future. I'm skeptical, but I've certainly been wrong before. We shall see.
Google Glass is another story. It was awkward, because of both the wear and the bystanders. You wore these pseudo-glasses that acted as an assistant. This would be solved with more people seeing them.
The other part is the social stigma. Of course there are slim sunglasses with recording lenses in them. With those, we are blissfully unaware. Glass was unknown. What's that guy doing? Is he taking pictures? Is he recording? There's this whole social space that Glass intrudes upon, and that's in additions to awkwardly speaking to yourself (really the device) for functionality purposes.
Sure VR has fantastic experiential applications, just like going to watch an IMAX 3D movie in the cinema is a great experience. But in the living room? I'm not quick to believe the hype.
Almost everyone in my network is excited about VR. Having the content creators on board is huge.
TV is a shared experience, VR is not.
Also VR is interactive while TV is largely passive.
What can be interesting is the likes of VR chatrooms/lounges.
I'd love to see Passive VR content and active VR content develop side-by-side like Movies and Videogames did.
For regular people, absolutely not, the TV and the couch works so much better as they expect a social experience and a certain level of convenience, but lets not dismiss what's possible here and what the potential market could be. Its also certainly not an either/or proposition here. The same way I have a 55" TV but also have television on tablets, laptops, and phones.
Also, VR doesn't need to be "big" to make it, the same way PC gaming doesn't need to be "big" to make it. My mom and grandma will never buy a higher end gaming PC, yet somehow PC gaming survives.
Remember, we had endless cynicism about music players[1], phones, and tablets as well. I think the cynical approach as the default in tech makes some sense as there's so much marketing led hype, but with phones and tablets the utility was fairly obvious early on. I believe this is true with VR today.
[1] "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."
Every senior I have demoed the Rift to ask me "what does it cost? how can I get one?"
The only reason they don't have one is that my answer is "you need a $2000 PC, a $900 headset and $250 controllers".
Lower the price and you will see it take off.
That's a huge difference. But yeah, the judge is still out.
(I'm big on VR and less so on 3D movies so I've not tried it.)
VR, on the other hand, is completely unprecedented. It unlocks a way to interact with virtual environments that simply was not possible before. It has practical uses that we haven't had time to discover yet. Dismissing it as a gimmick and comparing it to 3D movies is shortsighted, in my opinion. One might argue that the technology is not there yet, but that would be comparable to PDAs preceding smartphones.
Nowadays 3D movies are harder to find. Force Awakens came out on 3D six months later and only after a fan revolt. Let me tell you the 3D was better on my TV than in the theater.
The only saving grace at this point: VR. Samsung is making VR cool and hopefully Apple comes out with their own VR set. VR will bridge the gap until they build a no-glasses 3D TV.
Of course watching a romantic movie next to someone frantically playing a BF1 match probably wouldn't fly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbRG-KfWyVc
And other 3D TVs could replicate the idea:
https://www.tweaking4all.com/video/gaming/split-screen-game-...
Both took advantage of the fact most 3D formats were just two images side by side, so if you took something that could put two separate streams side by side like this:
http://www.kvm-switches-online.com/splitmux-hd-2lc.html
You could do exactly what you described.
One problem I could see would be any cross-talk. Normally cross-talk makes things look blurry, any cross-talk would result in seeing fringes of something completely unrelated to what you're viewing. But with active glasses (or high quality passive displays) I don't think it'd be much of an issue.
That's exactly it! The "no more split screen" use case is also something I thought of but forgot about :-)
Whereas for most games, it didn't add anything and sometimes it was even annoying (for example in AC, the placement of the HUD was way too close), for Uncharted 3 it really added some depths (pun intended).
I also tried to take the 2D version of some movies originally made in 3D and use the TVs own 2D to 3D conversion feature. While it obviously causes some artifacts and sometimes adds depth where it doesn't make sense (mainly TV screens inside the movie) I found that it worked surprisingly well.
Primarily, though, my wife and I use the 3D for the two player fulllscreen feature when playing games in split screen (Mario Kart 8). This is actually really cool, since it allows both players to only see their own part of the screen and also see their part in fullscreen.
I've done 3D movie nights at my house with friends. Of course there's that one friend who comes (knowing it's a 3D movie night) and then says they can't watch 3D and insist we not do 3D...
The more I think of it, the more a lot of last gen technologies were stop-gap measures until we had VR. The Kinect, and to a lesser extent the Wii, are also in this category. You lost all the convenience of a controller to kinda, sorta have a virtual experience where you avatar is closely tied to your body but projected onto the screen. Now you're really "in the game" or "on the set" when you consider what's possible with VR and movies/tv/machinima.
I also hope this is the end of 3D in the movie theaters. It not only looks completely wrong via the false exaggerated 3D effects typically in use, but most implementations kill the lighting levels and color fidelity. The cost for me and my wife to see a movie with parking, babysitter, and basic concessions is nearly $100. Selling me a sub-par experience with a grainy and dark screen is not how you beat Netflix, Amazon, and Google.
VR is lonely, you sit with a helmet on and ignore anyone in the room with you.
For the single 20 something male this may be fine, but for friends, couples, families, this is a deal breaker.
I do think people craving big or 3D experiences will migrate to VR. That was the point I was trying to convey, that a lot of the whiz-bang stuff marketers have been trying hard to sell this past generation really are just poor imitations of what VR can do and if you really want that kind of experience, you should consider just buying VR. VR can simulate a theater experience nicely and without the crowds, hassle, etc. I think once the resolution issue is resolved then cinephiles will naturally migrate to it.
I was just looking a the Windows Holographic lineup and thought that this is probably going to break through to the mainstream of mostly non-gamers. The killer app may be movies and TV seen on a huge and bright screen before your eyes. I can certainly see a $299, or less, VR set being big this xmas for this demographic.
1) a very narrow field of vision, about the same my 15.6" laptop screen at the distance I use it. It's very easy to miss virtual objects and having to look for them it's not a great experience compared to the peripheral vision we enjoy in RL.
2) Objects are always transparent so colors are weak. Unfortunately I don't see a way out of this, especially outdoors. There can't be black unless in a dark room.
#1 can be fixed, I don't know about #2.
Sure looks like fun for the whole family...
I just wanna 4k dumb TV.
And that's on a relatively supported device. I can't imagine how bad smart tv's are.
This got me curious and there are a couple of options, most from a brand called Sceptre that I haven't heard of. Here's one with 4k, 65" and no smart features: http://amzn.to/2kpcIqy
OTOH, the apps built into my TV stream 4k all day every day.
I'll show myself out.
[1] http://variety411.com/article/a-night-of-high-spirits-for-ar...
First is that it is interactive.
Second is that it is not shared like a TV in a room is.
Unlike 3D TVs, VR might be here to stay for the enthusiast market but I don't see it becoming a mass market must-have gadget for every household.
And because the current generation is so underwhelming and overhyped, there might be a 5-10 year period of relative silence before the next-next generation comes out - hopefully with much improved quality as the technology improves.
But the next year will tell... and it's up to the content side. If there will be a mega hit game, movie,other entertainment experience or even a serious application coming out I might be wrong.
Don't get me wrong, I've tried most of the VR gadgets out there and I kinda enjoyed using them (except the first Oculus devkit which was awful) and so did my friends. But they don't really keep me entertained for more than an hour or so. And I usually like to play with friends (in the same room) and having only one guy wearing the headset isn't really social.
Essentially VR and AR are 90% the same technology and design challenges, but with AR you feature in the already existing 3D world around you and VR creates one.
We haven't even scratched the surface of what it's capable of yet. Even if no AAA titles materialize the amount of creativity coming from lone devs and small studios is astonishing.
In terms of "failing" - it might not become a mass market thing yet - but it's got an enthusiast market that's not going anywhere soon. There are a dozen OpenVR headsets coming out in the near future so even if HTC and Oculus disappeared tomorrow it would be sustainable.
Bear in mind 3D is only a tiny part of what VR is about. The failure of 3D TVs doesn't teach us anything about the future of VR.
Anyone else surprised they're making this decision partly based on 'anecdotal information'? Or would it be explicitly phrased this way to prevent people from suspecting spyware in their TV sets?
VR will not be a substitute because it is a different medium.
What I missed the most was Minecraft (actually, I found some older mod and it was kinda weird in 3D, so maybe that's for the better) and porn. If this was available, I could still use it, but as it isn't, I gave it to my parents to replace their TV.
Color support does seem to matter in a side by side comparison for me. My MacBook pro colors "pop" a whole lot more than my gaming monitor's colors do. When I don't have them right next to each other, however, I hardly notice. It's hard to tell if it's the color (I think it is) or the resolution.
If that makes you less interested in getting HDR because you don't always watch TV in a dark room, well... yeah, it's definitely a more niche feature.
However, IMHO the more interesting thing about the HDR standards is the improved color gamut. That is quite noticeable when you get content that uses it properly, but there's precious little of it right now. However, I do occasionally commit videophile sin and turn on my TV's "fake up a guess about how the color gamut might look" mode even though my media isn't technically mastered in that, and there are some things that it does make beautiful, even if it is technically inaccurate. Inside Out in particular is jaw-dropping on my TV in Fake-o-HDR mode. (Which isn't entirely implausible, as I understand it the original movie is in an expanded gamut, but there's no Bluray that has the expanded gamut version AFAIK.)
The only annoyance is that there aren't enough 3d films available. So I guess this will just cement that issue.
But all it really does is keep prices high and creates no real value.
No
As an aside, it seems 3D projectors are still around. A friend showed me his setup just the other day.
The only 3d experience I enjoyed - well enough as I wouldn't dissuade someone from viewing the film in 3d, at least - was Gravity, since the small-aperture space cinematography was very suited to a 3d presentation, 3d contributed to the feeling of the film - helping acheive a sense of contrast in scale between the personal experience of the main character and the very large catastrophes around them, and not just a fancy way to produce distractions.