Thoughts on 3D movies & TV
I’ve seen a total of two 3D movies in my life:
- Avatar
- Toy Story 3
In both cases, there were several points in the movie where I thought: “Hey, is this still in 3D?” and I lifted up the glasses to see how much “depth” there really was. Upon lifting my glasses, viewing the blurred screen, and putting the glasses back on my face again, the 3D illusion returned.
I think the mind has a pretty strong ability to synthesize depth information, and that we don’t see things as “flat” just because they’re being projected on a flat screen. Similarly, when affronted with grossly exaggerated 3D effects from cinema or 3D TV, our brain compensates, bringing those images back into our normal range of experience.
These two factors: synthesizing depth for 2D movies, and clamping exaggerated depth in 3D movies, work in opposite directions, netting out to the fact that there is very little benefit for an actual 3D movie or TV viewing experience.
I think the best 3D I’ve seen to date has been in Coraline.
And I’m sure everyone read the slashdot articles about young children developing problems with deph perception because of 3d movies.
I felt like Tron was inexcusably amazing in 3d because of the certain parts that couldn’t have been shown any better but in 3d tbh.. (Like when you’re above their heads while they’re talking in the club with Daft Punk).
I can’t wait for 4d.
The 3D effects in many scenes are grossly exaggerated by increasing the offset of the 2 images far more than from a normal 2 inches of the human eye. Many scenes look like cardboard cutouts at various distances, and force the viewers to cross their eyes to avoid seeing double images.