The Glade 4.0

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/30/business/media/30panda.html?_r=1

Apparently, the love affair is over, and people have stopped shilling extra bucks for non-tentpole movies to see the 3-D version.

Yeah, 3-D has some potential, but it's really something that is going to take a lot of work to really make it worthwhile.

First, many films just don't really benefit from it. Drama's and comedies for instance don't really gain much from 3-D. Also, post-production 3-D work only makes for a very hokey 3-D experience. Really at this point the only film that I've seen where 3-D has really added to the film was Avatar, and the film was always planned for 3-D so there were shots and techniques used to help support the 3-D imaging.

Then there's the matter of the glasses. I have yet to use a pair of 3-D glasses that didn't suck. It's especially problematic if you wear glasses normally. Until such time that one is able to either no need glasses or have comfortable glasses options that work 3-D will only be a niche market.

3D How to Train You Dragon was right up there with Avatar, if not better.

_________________
"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

3D How to Train Your Dragon was, indeed, awesome, as was Toy Story 3.

I actually preferred Avatar in 2D.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

I don't watch 3D movies in the theater anymore, but I jump at new 3D content for my house. There's nothing wrong with the tech, it's awesome, but it's not worth a $15 movie ticket.

3-D has much to improve, it's a new technology. Ideally you should be able to focus on what you want in a 3-D scene, but you currently can't.

Also if it was proper 3-D, people would not get very dizzy or have strained eyes.

Coraline was impressive in 3D - mostly not in an overdone way but enough to really draw me into the world(s).

/skipped 3D when taking our little one to Kung Fu Panda II this weekend.
//agree that How to Train Your Dragon was great in 3D.

Basically, *true* 3-D is where the movie screen is like a portal, like you're right outside the edge of a holodeck looking in to another world, from the vantage point of the camera. It would be amazing. What we have is nothing like that.

Your brain already does that on a 2D movie. It treats the screen as a glass pane, and assigns depth to the elements behind it. The only way to make 3D have value is to ensure it moves in front of that glass pane, where it's truly noticeable, because your brain won't do that to a 2D image. If the audience is ducking or feels like they can reach out to touch certain elements, then the 3D is impressive. Without that, it is barely noticeable.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

That's not really true, Taly. 2D isn't like looking through a pane of glass, as you can focus and stereoscopically converge your eyes despite the glass -- it's transparent to those effects, and passes the full range of electromagnetic data. Simply looking past a transparent surface doesn't mean that what's behind it is projected onto the surface (which would indeed lose the same data that capturing a 2D image does). So 2D is not like looking through glass, at all.

Now, 3D photography is not the real world, either. Until the recorded image will adjust things like the plane of focus in reaction to the point your eyes are, um, focused (stereoscopically) on, and capture phase and vector information to cause your eyes to focus on something in front of or behind the screen, it's simply an illusion that's better than 2D projection.

The first part, changing the plane of focus, could be done by rendering custom images in real-time for each viewer while tracking their eye movements and using that as an input parameter to the next frame's rendering. So there, you're talking about VR goggles, VirtualBoy style.

The second part, engaging your eyes' focusing mechanisms, won't happen without full-on holography. And motion holography is pretty crazy to think about.

Now, I suppose there's a third option I haven't mentioned; and that's bio-modifications to allow for directly projecting the image onto your retina (or, for that matter, directly inject signals into the optic nerve, I suppose). We can project 2D images just fine, so if you bypass all the parts that our brain expects to have to engage to change the image coming in (namely, the focusing mechanisms), you don't have to construct a full holographic image just to have it collapsed back down to 2 dimensions on our retinas anyways. Then, as with the eye tracking adjustments of the stereoscopically displaced images, you can instead make your adjustments in real-time rendering based on tracking impulses to the muscles that control focus (or by tracking changes to the shape of the lens directly).

_________________
"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

It certainly does not. If our brains already gave depth to items without visual cues, we would have no need for techniques like depth of field. The whole reason things like drop shadows exist on graphics or windows is because our eyes have a hard time separating things without them. It adds the depth that the screen doesn't have, and our eyes can't make.

Well-done 3D actually does exactly what you're saying our eyes do for us. It creates depth where there is none. A believable effect can't be sustained when you're popping things out, due to the screen edges. The only way to make it realistic is to shrink your video and create a faux-border on which you can overlay 3D pop-outs. That's lame because it lowers your screen real estate. Indeed, the only way to create a good 3D effect is to make it less obvious. This is what certain films like Avatar or video games like Killzone 3 got right.

3-D is like a pop-up book. It's a 2D image in front of another 2D image. I've never felt that impressed outside of the first 3D film I saw at Disney World when I was eight.

_________________
"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I didn't say our eyes do it. I said our brains do it. There's a difference. Even in a flat cell-shaded cartoon, our visual cortex assigns depths to the various images. That's how we make sense of it. We don't do it consciously, but we certainly do it. Even more so in a photograph or a television show. If our brain wasn't capable of this, we wouldn't be able to make sense of the images we see on screen. Most animals are not capable of resolving 2D images as 3D objects, so a dog, for instance, does not usually react to images on a TV screen. A parrot does not look at a picture of a bird and see another bird. We're not entirely unique this way (Elephants have actually been shown to be able to do this), but we are special.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Probably not a new video to most of you, but it warrants embedding at this point in the conversation!

[youtube]Jd3-eiid-Uw[/youtube]

Talya:

In a pure 3-D setup, where you can focus on any point at will, you would not be able to tell it's fake. You can easily tell that something projected onto a screen is a 2-D projection.

Right there with you Talya, on all counts mentioned here.

_________________
The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. B. Franklin

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." -- Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones

Maybe when Hollywood realizes that Hollywood sucks, we'll be in business.

_________________
"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

They do kind of suck. They haven't made a great movie since Hurt Locker and Avatar, but they keep whining that it's piracy that's killing their sales.

Wow, with 42 critic reviews, X-Men: First Class is at 98% on rottentomatoes. Hrmmmmmm....

Quality and Ticket Sales are only tangentally related.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Agreed.

_________________
I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

I am glad that guy got a job after making that video. In fact, he helped develop Microsoft's Kinect if I recall correctly.

_________________
Les Zombis et les Loups-Garous!

I'm pretty sure that was part of his doctoral thesis.

_________________
Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

It's based on a comic book about super powers... that brings it down half a notch at least in awesomeness. The whole premise is "lets randomly give these people super powers just so they can have super powers and fight eachother and people who don't" or something. It's not not interesting enough.

Absolutely the number one thing wrong with 3-D! Followed closely by the fact that Hollywood doesnt understand how to use 3-D properly yet. It's still a gimmick to them. The glasses suck big time. Someone needs to start a business that can craft custom glasses for people, unfortunately that probably wont happen till the tech matures a bit and there aren't so many competing standards. I don't wear glasses normally, but when I wear sunglasses, I have to have wrap around sunglasses, otherwise I might as well not wear them because the sun coming in from the sides bothers me as much or more than head on. Same thing with the crappy 3-D glasses, I spend more time being annoyed by the stupid frames blocking part of my field of vision, and what I can see out the sides, than I do watching the 3-D on the screen.