Why 3D doesn't work and never will.
blogs.suntimes.com
blogs.suntimes.com
(Arthur C) Clarke's First Law: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; when he states that something is impossible, he is probably wrong."
... has turned out to be correct often enough that I wouldn't want to place large bets on this.
(Digression: there's an obvious difficulty in assessing Clarke's First Law. When someone says something is impossible and is wrong, we can tell because, lo, someone else does it. But when someone says something is impossible and is right, we'll never really know for sure; the most we can say is that no one has done it yet. So: time travel? teleportation? faster than light travel? Plenty of eminent (and in some cases elderly) scientists have said, and doubtless will continue to say, that these things are impossible; for all we know they really are; but even if they are we'll never know for sure that Clarke's First Law is wrong for them.)
[EDITED in response to two comments: If the claim is "3D done just like it is now will never work" then I agree that CFL isn't very relevant. If it's "3D movies will never work", which is what I think "3D doesn't work and never will" ought to mean, then I think CFL applies. So maybe I'm really only criticizing Ebert and not Murch, who does embed into his comments the sentence 'Nothing will fix it short of producing true "holographic" images.'. I do wonder whether the quotes around "holographic" are trying to define it to mean "anything that fixes this problem" rather than strictly "something close to full-wavefront reconstruction using coherent light", in which case I guess he's right by definition and therefore vacuously. I would certainly not want to bet that actual literal holograms are the only way to solve the problem.]
This is just Ebert being an idiot and saying "This is my opinion, stated as fact, case closed. I won't enter into any discussion because I might be wrong", just like he said when he declared video games weren't art. It is /profoundly/ unscientific to dismiss something as unfactual simply because you don't like it.
Back in the day, my honours degree was specifically involved in investigating ocular vergence (research jargon as 'angle between the eyes' as opposed to the /action/ of converging), comparing between a collimated image (= light coming to the eye in 'parallel' - from a military helicoptor pilot's HUD) and a real image (= light coming in 'non-parallel') displayed at 3m. At that distance there is already not much difference between focusing or vergence at 3m and at infinity (ie collimated), though discrepancies slightly increase as you move towards the periphery of your vision, though this may have been an artifact of the presentation of the HUD.
I am not an expert in 3D and don't proclaim it to be 'there yet'. I do think that 3D is doable if the director stops the temptation of the 'power' closeup to showoff the 3D. So yeah, I think within constraints, 3D is doable. All film has constraints though, and those constraints are gradually eroded over time - such as night-time filming. Fifty years ago we would have heard Ebert proclaiming that it's impossible to film in natural light at night because film needs a certain amount of light, case closed, yet we've seen some amazing cameras arrive recently that can film at night using natural light.
EDIT: Another example constraint is limiting yourself to a 'viewing box' - you can't turn your head for a full view of the scene in a movie. You're limited to a particular forced view. Despite this rather incredibly limiting constraint, film has managed to do some pretty amazing stuff.
The part about focus of the eye is much more difficult to overcome. I think it has to do with resolution. And maybe a movie with a resolution of let's say 16.000 x 9.000 will give a better result because your eye can focus on details just like in real life.
But constraints of human beings don't change much. If our brains are not wired to really get the current 3D format, then I think that is a pretty good indictment of the technology. The post isn't saying 3D movies won't exist someday, it is saying the current 3D can't work well because of a limitation in the human mind.
But more importantly, the 600 million years of evolution argument doesn't hold the water he is putting in it. 600 million years of evolution did not prepare humans for traveling at 60 mph (much less controlling two tons of steel and insuring the safety of their children, while doing so), nor did it prepare humans for sitting in front of a bright light pecking at keyboards for hours and hours on end.
Focusing on one point while converging on another may require practice, but so does operating an RC car. But the fact that a broad swath of the population can readily do it the very first time, speaks against it.
Essentially, the case against 3d movies is an appeal to authority, and the article is really a rejection of the art form (3d is the rap music which is replacing their beloved rock and roll). That's not to say that there isn't a lot of schlock 3d - who really expected Green Hornet to be great cinema? - only that there is nothing inherently wrong with the medium.
That last bit could be used to support Murch's argument, if the articles I've seen on HN about ergonomic chairs and sitting versus standing are any indication.
This argument is missing the point. True, evolution didn't prepare us to drive cars, however it did prepare us to spend long periods of time focusing on objects at fixed distances and then changing our focus on the ~hundreds of milliseconds timescale. It also evolved us to allow independent movement of limbs during this process, essentially what driving a car is. This same argument could be applied to typing at a computer (without the need to change focus very quickly).
I think the point is that cinema in 3D forces us to change the location of our focus very rapidly (much faster than hundreds of milliseconds) for long periods of time, something that we are not equipped to do. For a physical activity like sitting our muscles are malleable enough to adjust to a sedate lifestyle, but to increase the speed and duration of rapid eye focusing would most likely require rewiring the brain. Perhaps if we were raised in this pseudo-3D realm our brain could adjust, but adults brains aren't wired to change like our muscles are.
Like any new tech, makers want to convince us this tech is the way to go. So study more, and give us the old school alternatives.
I saw Tron in 3D and suffered very mild side effects -- facial tension and a headache that went away after a few glasses of wine. The 3D effects weren't enough to make even those mild side effects worth it. I'm not even sure the 3D effects were a net plus for the experience without considering the side effects. Add a 40% premium on the ticket price, and it was a great deal for the theater and a lousy deal for me.
Until the technology changes fundamentally, I'm starting to think 3D movies are like heroin: we'll see a periodic resurgence and decline as the lessons fade away with one generation and are relearned by the next.
Where I watched Green Hornet (very funny movie if you don't expect to see a Coen brothers film, I think) the glasses were cheap plastic and you could take them home. I actually have two sets, maybe I'll give it a try :D
I'm sure the same was said about television, or travelling more than 30 miles per hour.
IOW, 3D movies induce eyesore and headaches, and there are plenty of people who experience that, myself included. could that hurt developing eyesight? no idea, but i can imagine why it could.
Altering and improving human beings is not undoable, it's simply a hard engineering problem. The technological improvement of human eyes started out with glasses, then contact lenses, then laser operations and eye surgery. There's no reason to believe we won't eventually overcome the problems stated in the article by clever engineering of the eyes and brain.
[1]As Bellaire pointed out below, the quote is from Arthur C. Clarke and not Douglas Adams.
3d movies, where we're all sat down in a fixed chair makes absolutely no sense. It's a gimmick that adds nothing - apart from headaches, crappy dark image and occasional crude "THIS IS 3D" in your face 'effects'. Sitting in a chair looking at a screen we already see 3D. We have all the cues necessary for our brains to reconstruct the scene.
Didn't work in the 50s, didn't work in the 80s, didn't work in 2010s. I guess every generation has some people who think it's a great idea to try it again.
I agree that a lot of bad 3D movies are put out there now, and I think the current hype will fade. But I have no doubt that the technology has advanced far enough that 3D is here to stay this time.
Hah! You wish. For example, Avatar made more than $2,000,000,000. That's $2 billion. And a huge part of the Avatar revenue comes from its 3D sales. Maybe it didn't work for you, but it sure worked for most people who went to see it.
FWIW, I saw it in 2D first, loved it, then later saw it in 3D and hated every minute watching it. It was dark and gave me a HUGE headache.
I also think it wasn't a great movie itself. It was a really safe storyline to appeal to a broad audience.
If it was 2D it would have likely sold the same number of tickets, just at a lower per-ticket price. Consider that it's DVD and Blu-Ray sales are commensurate with its box-office gross, with no 3D on offer.
You are underestimating the marketing value of the 3D effects. Of course the DVD sales will be great, because it has been on everyones radar for the last year+. 3D effects were a big part of that.
People saw AVATAR because hundreds of millions were spent on marketing, it had James Cameron's name attached, and it was well liked by popular critics and audiences. 3D was a footnote compared to that attention.
3D effects do no marketing favors for middling or outright-poor movies. The only thing they consistently do, is increase average ticket prices.
A friend sees the movie and says 'you HAVE to see this in 3D' and it becomes less about the plot, and more about the effects driving them to purchase a ticket.
You can't show the 3D in marketing, but you can (and they did) highlight the concept of it. It's like all those ads on TV about fancy TV screens with superior image quality -- they obviously don't show you the screen itself.
I saw both versions.
I don't get hte "3d headache" - but I definitely enjoyed the 2d version more. THere was more detail to focus on, and in tha tmovie, detail was everything. With the 3d version, I found myself trying to look at things in the foreground/background, and I just couldn't - not becuuse of any defect in my ability to manipulate my eyes, but because (I think...) they actually used differnet depth of field settings when rendering the 2 versions.. there were things in the 3d version you literally COULDNT focus on - they wanted your eyes on the action only. That buged me.
- I remember playing 3d Quake (the original) on my crappy home monitor, with LCD shutter glasses - and it was AWESOME FUN. SCARY.
So I think all the points in the article are valid, 3d is hard, for more reasons than joe average might know, I certainly learned some stuff - but it's definitely a aprt of the future, if only because our current equipment makes it technically easy to play back.
In a universe where Avatar 3D never existed, would the 2D version alone have sold as much? Remember, they would have also been able to deliver the movie earlier (I don't know how much, but making a 3D movie can't be free - at least not yet).
I'm reasonably certain that there are only a very small number of people who saw Avatar for the sole reason of it being 3D (in other words, if the 2D version was the only option, they would have skipped it).
Avatar did exactly the opposite of what intended to do and that is, it turned me off of 3D movies not on to them. Sure, it made the money it did, but at least for me, it didn't do anything to advance the technology nor promote it.
Go to a real IMAX theater and watch a real IMAX movie. They tend to be science documentaries, like Hubble 3D. Compared to that, Avatar just seemed fuzzy and out of focus to me.
A good friend can't enjoy 3D movies because for that reason.
About the "small" thing, I sat at the 4th row (?) and the image was fine.
Why not respond to those comments in child comments rather than in the parent? Surely that makes the most sense? It's very difficult to read a discussion where I have to read responses to comments I haven't read yet.
Given the choice between a discussion where some bits have been clarified in the light of later comments, and a discussion where some bits are needlessly confusing or wrong, I choose the former.
(I might take a different view if there had been lots of replies, which might have been invalidated as as result of the edit. But there weren't; just those two.)
I'm not sure how it would work, but the idea is to change the dioptry to the inverse of the distance of what's supposedly on the screen, so that our eyes need to focus at the same distance as the converging, effectively nullifying the inverse focus.
It's theoretically possible to produce some kind of hologram-like 3D that would side-step this problem.
I'd hate to be introduced like that.
That said, his points make sense. I don't get a headache from watching 3D movies but it does cause extra strain. It's more tiring than watching a normal movie. I have no intention of buying a 3D TV at any point in the future, and though I'll go to a 3D cinema for the different experience, if the movie is the right kind for 3D (e.g. Avatar), I certainly don't see it as a revolutionary new technology.
Another argument I heard against 3D movies is that apparently our brains use all sorts of cues (about 20, I think) other than differences between what the eyes see, in order to make us see things as 3D (which is why, among other things, the world doesn't suddenly look 2-dimensional if you cover one eye). 3D movies provide only one of those cues, and so naturally causes a strange feeling because the other 19 cues are missing.
Another nail in the coffin of 3DTV: It's been out for years and I don't know a single person who has bought one.
A big one is atmospheric haze, which is easy to reproduce to be fair. It is also the reason for a lot of the perceived inconsistencies in apollo moon photography: http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/tv/foxapollo.html#background...
Tron on the other hand, generally didn't have this problem, there was huge depth of field throughout, and generally nothing too straining.
Having said that, I agree, with one catch. Here's the thing: we currently don't have 3-D movies.
We have this fake 2-plane deal put on with funky glasses. That's why the cineamtographers can screw around with your eyes so much like the letter writer explains.
I want 3-D. True 3-D. Not some hacked up fake 3-D. True 3-D would consist of a large, rotating drum in the middle of my living room, approximately 6 or 7 feet tall, and several feet wide. Images would display as three-dimensional objects, viewable from all angles.
Big? Cumbersome? Impractical? Probably. But at least it's a true 3-D experience. When a couple of actors appeared and started talking, it would literally appear as if they were in the same room as you. Directors couldn't have arrows poke out at your eyes or any of that other silly nonsense that they seem to not be able to refrain from doing with the current tech.
The current hacky stuff that passes for 3-D is broken and won't be fixed, this much is true. It remains to be seen whether or not this tech finds a niche in games or specialty cinema, though. It's also an open question as to the future of real 3-D. I'm not so crazy about having the terms all mixed up, because the really cool stuff is coming later.
That's what idea #65 is all about:
http://jacquesmattheij.com/Idea+dump+January+2011+edition
Minus the drum, but when it's spinning it might as well be a drum.
Do you mean something like this?
http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/28/sonys-360-degree-raymodel...
It's worth pointing out that after spending his entire career editing film by hand, he was one of the first editors to switch to editing film with Avid; and after being a prominent proponent of Avid, he was the first film editor to edit a major motion picture with Apple's Final Cut Pro, somewhat against the wishes of Apple, who didn't think it was ready (despite the name). Meanwhile he developed a database application in Filemaker Pro for keeping track of all of the shots in a movie, starting rather early on, as I recall --- an application now in use by some other film editors who have worked with him.
So whatever the guy's faults (he does seem to enjoy a good story more than fact-checking it) he's not a Luddite. If he thinks something new won't work, it's not because he distrusts new things.
(Disclaimer: he's my father-in-law, so my judgment may be biased.)
Note: He's not my father-in-law. I've never met him, just a fan.
Don't bother with technology. What "piracy" proves is that people are more than willing to trade quality for convenience. People will put up with crappy image and garbled sound if it means they can watch what they want faster.
The movie industry loves technology because technology scales (sort of); but what sells tickets are story and talent.
I really wish what you said was true and that filmmakers would focus more on great stories, but box office takes show again and again that flashy effects beat great stories 4 times out of 5.
Incorporating 3D in every single movie just because Avatar was a huge hit would have been like shooting only sinking ships after Titanic.
Your relentless drumming of this point -- i've seen you post similar comments to this at least once before in this discussion --lacks merit I think.
Nor is acting talent particularly necessary either, if handled right. Some of my favorite directors restrain their actors, even great ones, from acting at all (e.g. any Bresson, or Pasolini's Teorema) or they use non-actors to great effect (e.g. Fellini, and Pasolini again with things like Decameron).
You do have a point about flashy technology though.
Oh come on. Avatar may not have been the greatest story ever conceived by the minds of men but it was entertaining, thought provoking and the whole imagined world was a kind of story in itself.
Now if we were talking about Transformers 2, then I would agree ..
$> sudo science
"I believe you now."
Hasn't the video game industry grossed more per year since the early 2000s? Why would anyone declare 3d dead based on a smaller industry like Movies?
The only fundamental difference is one of wavelength.
How much of the $3.50 "3D upcharge" is this guy seeing? My initial guess is "none."
if your brain is frequently exposed to 3d films, couldnt it get used to processing that kind of imagery? so as time passes by more and more people go to the movies without a headache?
I discovered this the hard way. I'm prone to motion sickness, and after I'd lived in NYC for a number of years it was unpleasant for me to transition back to being in a car. But now driving doesn't bother me any more.
I say this as someone who suffers from motion sickness, yet who rides in planes and buses. There simply aren't any reasonably easy alternatives.
I think people will be able to adapt to 3D. Whether they will want to has to do with artistry and not a new technology as a gimmick.
Ebert: "Stop watching that 3D movie, it's straining your eyes!" Me: "But... no it isn't and it's awesome" Ebert: "It isn't immersive! Me: "I'm feeling perfectly immersed, thank you" Ebert: "But there are all these valid but theoretical reasons why you shouldn't enjoy it!" Me: "Would you please just shut up and let me watch the movie? The aliens are about to have all the sex. In 3D!" Ebert: "Hrumph!"
You can see how I let myself get the last word there, not counting Ebert's old-grumpy-man-throat-clearing. So clearly I had all the winning arguments.
My point is this: All the theoretical reasoning about planes and strains are moot as far as I know. Because in the end... 3D is awesome. I love it, and I wont let any experts in the world convince me otherwise. Even Feynman wouldn't be able to... well ok, maybe Feynman. But none other!
You're allowed to enjoy whatever you want — Ebert isn't arguing with you. He's talking about inherent problems with the technology that come out in the general case.
But I think it is my opinion that is relevant. And yours. And your moms. Why talk about inherent problems in the general case at all, no matter if it is kid's drawings or 3D movies. There is a market for both of them.
He's making a case for the objective value of something where I believe only subjective values matter. To each his own.
There are objective things and subjective things and some shades between. You're talking about purely subjective tastes and Ebert was not. You may want to talk about subjective things, but that isn't what he was doing.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3ea83ed0-1770-11e0-badd-00144feabd...
You're using hand picked data points to argue against the validity of an attempted reasoned argument.
And for many people the experience of 3D movies isn't much of an improvement over 2D movies.
I don't like bananas in cooked food. But I don't feel the need to lament about it or make up scientific reasons to why it should be abolished. I simply avoid eating it.
A good for instance is that I recently saw Green Hornet in 3D -- not by choice entirely, since they weren't showing a 2D version. As an example, in one scene, they were panning to a person talking who was sitting behind a desk. The pencil holder was in 3D of course. I was very aware of the pencil holder as a result. But the pencil holder was irrelevant to the scene, but that's all I was looking at.
"....the new development was treated with suspicion by many filmmakers and critics, who worried that a focus on dialogue would subvert the unique aesthetic virtues of soundless cinema."
In this new Talkies all the sound comes from one speaker on the floor and it doesn't sound like it's coming from the actor at all.
Obviously I'm being facetious, but there is no reason to suppose people won't learn to handle cinema 3D.
Of course it's a win-win situation for the studios selling people 3d.
Talkies = NO SOUND vs SOUND. It's binary.
3D = "20 visual cues about 3D" vs "19 visual cues about 3D"
3D is like smell-o-vision would be - a gimmick, distracting, and adding nothing to the story.
In fact, it'd probably be safe to just assume that the user is focused on the primary element in the scene. Unfortunately, in a theater, you probably can't compensate for focus in a way that works for all of the audience, so this doesn't solve much.
If you can't control focus, then you are presented with a much larger scene. You (the viewer) would be choosing who and what to pay attention to, removing control from the film maker, and unless this additional degree of freedom is compensated for, the experience would go down. The way you tell the story as a result would change dramatically. You can't just tag on "3D version available!" to a movie and expect it to work, it requires a different way of telling a story.
The second, larger issue, is the physiological contraction of muscles each eye individually must do to focus at a given distance. Try this: cover one eye and look at a held up finger with the other eye. Notice the background is blurry. Now make the background clear and you'll notice your finger is blurry.
The eye adjusts its shape to focus on different distances. This is independent of the two eyes working together and seeing different images which the brain later merges into a 3D scene.
The issue with all the current 3D technologies I know about is the image, ultimately, is always on some screen at a fixed distance. You can give each eye separate images, you can track where the eye is looking and modify what image is seen, but in the end, the eye muscles are always contorting the eye to see that plane 80' away clearly.
Have a camera facing the eye that can tell what the person is focusing on. (High end video cameras already have this.)
Have an adaptive lense in the glasses to vary rapidly change the focal plane from where they eye things it is to the screen. You then build software that blurs the image outside of their focal plane. Granted there are limits on this aproach, but people get used to glasses that have a fixed shift in the focal plain fairly quickly so it should be possible.
Now I don't see how you could extrapilate that to a theater full of people, but you can build a system that works for 1 person.
Sorry I was a bit terse, but that's what I meant by "detected focus."
> You then build software that blurs the image outside of their focal plane.
That's not it exactly. The problem you're trying to solve is that, when the viewer is focused at one depth but is viewing a flat image at another depth, it will already appear blurry to him. You can't fix that with extra blurring. The fix is to distort the original image, much like corrective lenses.
And BTW, I suspect that you can't perform this correction for even a single viewer in the audience unless you're tracking his location and orientation.
"Have an adaptive lense in the glasses to vary rapidly change the focal plane"
AKA their eyes focus on 50', and the screen is at 100’. But the glasses change that to 100' and the software shows a clear images for 50' with the correct amount of blur for stuff outside of that range. You still need to double the frame rate etc for the 3d effect, but you can alter things so brain is less confused.
The idea is without the bluring the full immage is in focus regardless of what the users eye tryes to focus on 5' or 500' the screen is still in focus. This would work ok, but by bluring part of the immage you get an even closer simulation of the real world.
Edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjustable-focus_eyeglasses
Also, regarding: "Nothing will fix it short of producing true "holographic" images." See: http://www.holografika.com/
I don't buy any of these articles. Yes some people won't respond well to 3D, but the vast majority does and has in every implementation. This is as absurd as saying when the Model T was released, that because of a minority of the population having motion sickness that the automobile is destined to fail.
I don't know a single person who has a problem with 3D. Well technically that's a lie, I know someone who's blind in one eye, so with the glasses they're just watching an over expensive 2D movie and without they're just watching a very fuzzy movie.
Whether that amounts to "not working" is perhaps up for discussion, but I think they have a point that the problems with 3D extend far beyond the fact that some people have adverse physiological reactions while watching.
It's not out of the question. When I was very young my eyesight was good enough to develop depth perception, but since then my eyes have gone a bit nearsighted. It's not so bad I wear glasses, but it's bad enough that I don't have reliable parallax-based depth perception. I recently went to see the Tron movie in 3D as an experiment, but I wasn't sure I'd even get depth perception in it.
In fact I did, and I also can't say that it bothered me any more than a normal movie. I think that's because I didn't have the conflict the other people are talking about because my brain stopped rigidly expecting depth perception a while ago. But you can't build the 3D market on people like me.
Why doesn't this also cause discomfort in a conventional 2D movie in which the focal plane and the convergence angle stay the same (both at the screen plane) but our brains expect the convergence angle to change as items from different distances in the movie image come into focus in the movie?
> The 3D image is dark [...] and small.
I just saw a 3D movie last week and didn't notice that.
> [...] horizontal movement will strobe much sooner in 3D than it does in 2D.
I just saw a 3D movie last week and it was good. I was able to determine this despite having no idea what strobing is.
> So 3D films require us to focus at one distance and converge at another.
I just saw a 3D movie last week and had no issues with convergence.
> 3D films remind the audience that they are in a certain "perspective" relationship to the image.
I just saw a 3D movie last week and was very immersed.
Next up, we have a scientist with a theory about what the far side of the moon looks like. Apollo whatnow?
Lots of people, otherwise very smart and picky people, have absolutely no "taste" for visual content. They will cheerfully accept the most terrible photographs and shakey video if they accept that as par for the course. Artists tend to take a more objective view, and frequently notice things that their audience may not consciously notice, but that do have measurable effects on the overall quality of the production.
This is as true for videography as it is for photography (in which emotional investment can make people overlook ridiculous image flaws for years before finally seeing the ugly half-face in the corner or a totally botched focus). Unless you train yourself to look objectively, you're often not seeing what's in front of you, merely representing it and evaluating that representation (which is always the case, of course, but there are naturally degrees of fidelity).
For example, I saw Alice in Wonderland 3D, and I was viewing it at the excellent Sundance theater in San Francisco. We're allowed to take drinks into the theater, and we all had a Bit Too Much™ before the start. I don't remember the 3d of that movie being bad, but upon re-inspection and some pointers I can see what a hack-job that was, even among its lackluster peers at the time.
http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/04/video_games_can_neve...
...should be interpreted with a grain of salt.
What he doesn't seem to realize is that your state of focus (accommodation) is just about identical for objects at 10 feet away, 20 feet away, etc., out to infinity. So if your eyes converge on a screen 80 feet away, and try to focus on an object 40 feet away, that's absolutely fine, because the state of focus for 40 and 80 feet away are virtually the same anyway. Your visual system can't tell the difference. This is an experimentally demonstrated fact.
That is to say, your state of focus varies only for objects less than about ten feet away. Focus on a salt shaker three feet away, and yes, the distant horizon will be out of focus. But focus on a tree about 20 feet away, and the distant horizon will be in perfect focus.
For an object to be in focus, the distance from the lens to the film (or in this case, the retina), dr, the distance from the lens to the object, do, and the lens's optical power must obey the lensmaker's equation, (1/di) + (1/do) = P. In the human eye, do = 0.017 m, and P is adjustable. Plot P vs. do, and you'll see the P quickly asymptotes as you move beyond around 3 m.
There are perceptual issues with 3D, but this isn't one of them, at least in cinemas where the screen is far away.
P.S. Tron 2 was much better in 2D than 3D. The darker screen was annoying and the 3D was far from immersive.
sequel to a classic: yes
3D: no
storyline: no
acting: no
VFX: yes
Daft Punk: yes
actual Unix on the big screen: yes
hot chicks attracted to nerds: yes
Disney 'family policy' WRT said hot chicks: no
It may help to realize that this is a parallel universe to ours and the way their computers appear to work is that they really are an interface to the world of Tron, which is subordinate to the conventional universe but by all appearances is every bit as real. Thus, Clu's plan is not a violation of the conservation of mass, because it's all working differently here. It's much more a 1960s/1970s-style scifi rather than an "ultra-realistic 2010 scifi" (ahem), but within those bounds I was actually pleasantly surprised. Not that it will ever amount to anything but in the back of my head I've actually been working out the physics of Tron, which could be really cool for a 2020-era MMORPG (would take too much processing power to be feasible today), and there's actually enough consistency (perhaps surprisingly) that it's not all in vain; there's different rules, but there are some rules.
It is interesting to think that perhaps we're technologically approaching something like a _boundary_, a point past-which the synthetic simulation of sensory experiences cannot be taken-in merely as entertainment but rather has strong physiological effects.
Consider the effects of effects of Ultra-High Resolution Video: "The footage was later projected on a 4 x 7 metre screen for public demonstration and the public were astonished. As the visual effect of the footage travelling down a road was so realistic, some viewers even experienced nausea as a side effect of seeing ultra realistic motion, but not physically feeling the motion. It's like the opposite of seasickness where you can feel movement, but cannot see it while in an enclosed section."
http://forum.doom9.org/archive/index.php/t-62376.html
I think that implies that at the very least, the producers of the most advanced sensory-simulations are going to be somewhat constrained in what they can produce, the opposite of what one thinks of in considering the freedom of film...
Can we please ditch 24 fps for the movies? It's not 3d that strobes. It's crappy fps. 3D just makes it noticeable because we never learned to ignore it like in normal movies.
I know it gives you that popcorn old school real movie theater feeling, but it just sucks for anyone who had experience with higher FPS (which slowly becomes almost everybody).
When I first watched 3d movie few years ago I was strongly annoyed about how my experience was ruined by poor technical quality. When I watched Avatar the IMAX got upgraded so it was much better and because I was immersed in the movie I didn't mind, but low frame-rate was still noticeable.
Can movie directors finally decide to shoot movies in higher FPS or they are still afraid that higher frame-rate will make their move have VHS feel not cinema theater feel?
"The Problem With 3-D: It hurts your eyes. Always has, always will."
http://www.slate.com/id/2215265/pagenum/all/
With slight differences, stereoscopic 3D on a flat screen is an over-50-year-old technology. It gets repeatedly tried, then the novelty wears off and the negatives become familiar, and it recedes for a while – returning when it's 'novel' again.
Perhaps children who watch a lot of screen-3D can adapt. However, it's equally possible lingering impairment to vision could result – temporary or permanent. See the speculation by Mark Pesce about why his 1990s Sega VR project got cancelled:
"Keep doing that and you'll go blind"
When the technology for producing and watching in real 3d (e.g. volumetric display technology and corresponding recording technology) becomes available, the entire process of producing a movie will be radically different from how it is today. Currently, everything is controlled at production time. Once you get real 3D, the "camera position" is controlled by the viewer. That should be quite a change for directors and editors. Once you get real 3D, you will probably not sit still while watching a production. you will want to move around, explore it. This will have interesting effects when a lot of people are watching a production together and people flock around because they discovered something interesting in the back. Or maybe there will be a controller for moving the camera position, that would take fights for the remote to a whole new level ;)
Also, acting might become quite different from what it is today, because recording a movie might no longer be done with a photographic process but may be based purely on motion capturing. Actors would become puppeteers. (Some are today: think Gollum)
What I'm trying to say. Real 3D will be much more revolutionary for cinematography. What we are seeing today is just a gimmick. Nothing more.
But it's not that 3D will never work, it's that we're clueless about how it will be made to work.
3D films are a distinct medium, not "films++". Right now, we're at the equivalent of the, "I know, let's point a single, unmoving camera at a stage play!" stage of early cinematography. At that point in time, you could come up with an analysis as good as Murch's for why this "filmed stage play" thing was just stupid and could never be satisfying - and it would be just as completely correct.
Just like you can't just point a camera at a stage to make a movie, you can't just throw three-dimensionality at a movie production to make a 3D movie. We need to develop a new craft. We need a good decade or more of people poking at this technology in a real, innovative way. We need lots of directors and cinematographers experimenting with this. Hell, we need a horde of film students making inane, pretentious shorts with rented or borrowed equipment - or even people who've never been near a film school. We need this sort of work just to get started in this new medium.
Last weekend I was playing with some 3-D glasses, black paper and colored pencils, trying to draw stereoscopic images by hand. The first thing I realized is that you've really got to get conventional perspective right... It has to tell a consistent story or your brain is going to really rebel.
Edit: Also, all these people are just speculating, there's no science backing up any pro or anti 3D claims. I would be careful giving Nintendo 3DS's to small children, that are still developing vision, but as I said I don't think watching a 3D movie every now and then is a bad thing if you enjoy doing so.
Sure, the current technology has some weaknesses, but as others have said, many found it awfully compelling in Avatar (many good reviews, and $2B in revenue).
I think your comment should be directly in response to the article.
I might head down to an electronics store and give on the 3D televisions a try, that way I'll know if my condition will negatively affect the experience as much as I expect.
Increase the frame rate already. 24fps is not the word of god. It's used because that was all they were able to do 100 years ago, and then it became de-facto standard. Time to move on already.
Yes, we need to capture more information than simply two video channels (left and right). Probably a lot more. Then we could re-create a true illusion of depth.
The entire premise of 3d basically excludes me.
Not for the the 3D, but for:
1. A New Pilot Wings. No price is too high to pay for a new Pilot Wings. I have been waiting years.
2. Portable Ocarina of Time. Same reason.
The entertainment and distraction they provide me (I can play Zelda OoT over and over, it does not get tiring or dull to me) is worth every cent.
Edit: English, I can't type it.
This guy built a stunning demonstration giving a 3d effect with a wiimote and a standard TV: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw
A real 3D "thing" is currently to expensive and not practical for a mass market.
I saw Pixar's "Up" in 3D. Such a touching story.
But at the sad scenes, when my eyes started to water up, I became super conscious of the fact that I had silly oversized glasses on my face, and it ruined the moment.
Watching the Blu-ray, in the comfort of my own home, I'm bawling like a baby.