The Joke Known As 3D TV 594
harrymcc writes "I'm at IFA in Berlin — Europe's equivalent of the Consumer Electronics Show — and the massive halls are dominated by 3D TVs made by everyone from Sony, Samsung, and Panasonic to companies you've never heard of. The manufacturers seem pretty excited, but 3D has so many downsides — most of all the lousy image quality and unimpressive dimensionality effect — that I can't imagine consumers are going to go for this. 'As a medium, 3D remains remarkably self-trivializing. Virtually nobody who works with it can resist thrusting stuff at the camera, just to make clear to viewers that they’re experiencing the miracle of the third dimension. When Lang Lang banged away at his piano during Sony’s event, a cameraman zoomed in and out on the musical instrument for no apparent reason, and one of the company’s representatives kept robotically shoving his hands forward. Hey, it’s 3D — watch this!'"
The brain doesn't like what doesn't make sense (Score:5, Informative)
If 3D content creators would stop making window violations and (my favourite) changing the convergence point of the screen without zooming (and vice versa) the idea that 3d is going to give headaches wouldn't have as much fact to go on. I'm sure some people get headaches anyway, but the majority of the people get them because of this stupid filmography. Also, stop changing the 3d depth every shot. I'm looking at you, Avatar.
If you give the brain realistic input that could actually happen, people would be more comfortable with it and it would be more likely to sell.
Also, the ghosting on some glasses is terrible. I could even see it in RealD, but it wasn't nearly as bad as some systems I've used (especially anaglyphs).
I hope it gets good before everyone becomes disinterested, because I'm actually excited for 3d to become kindof standard.
Re:Early days of stereo audio.... (Score:3, Informative)
I just hope that trideo* matures fast.
* Hey, Shadowrun described this stuff ages ago so why not stick to their nomenclature? It's handier than "3D TV".
Re:Remember the 1960's? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:SCTV is on the air! (Score:4, Informative)
What a GREAT skit. I still love it...
The "sweet spot" problem and the "edge" problem (Score:5, Informative)
Stereoscopic 3D has two very serious problems that have never been solved. The first is the "sweet spot" problem. Imagine a person standing so that they are lined up exactly with a flagpole. In real life, if you move to one side or the other, the relationship changes and you can now see the flagpole... and you no longer see the person exactly in full-face, but slightly in profile. In a stereoscope 3D presentation, the relationship between the screen elements cannot change. You will see the person exactly lined up with the flagpole no matter where you sit. This sounds trivial, but if you work out the consequences, it means that if a person is standing on a square-tiled floor, the tiles must become skewed into rhombuses if you move to the side. And the depth relationships change, too. The picture becomes squashed or flattened if you sit too close to the screen, elongated with exaggerated depth if you set too far away.
This means that a 3D picture only looks right when viewed from one, specific seating location, the sweet spot. And, worse yet, it only looks right if the cinematographer eschews the use of wide-angle or long lenses, but films the entire movie only with lenses of the single correct focal length, which means throwing away a century of film grammar.
The valid appeal of 3D is to add the realism of depth. But unless you are sitting exactly in the sweet spot and the cinematographer has used only one focal length for the whole film, you do not get realistic depth, you get warped geometrical distortion--and worse yet distortion that changes from one shot to the next.
Have you ever watched a movie from the extreme left seat in the front row? Unpleasant, isn't it? Well, 3D has the same problem, but greatly amplified.
You may not notice it consciously, but your brain has to work overtime to prevent you from noticing it, and it is fatiguing.
The second problem involves any object whose 3D placement is in front of the screen but is near the edges. It is a little hard to explain, but remember that without glasses the object shows up double, as a pair. If it is well in front of the screen, it is a widely separated pair. The glasses make sure your right eye sees only the left image of the pair and vice versa, but the problem is that as the object moves toward the left edge of the screen, one image moves offscreen and disappears before the other does. So, as these objects approach the edge, you see them only with one eye. This actually happens in real life for objects behind a rectangular opening, as in a proscenium theatre stage, so you are used to it and it seems natural. But in real life it never happens for objects that are in front of a rectangular opening, and it is weird, unnatural, and fatiguing. The only way to solve it is to have a screen so huge you don't really see or notice the edges. This probably explains why IMAX 3D is relatively successful--it takes a giant screen to avoid the edge effect.
Together, these two problems mean that 3D cannot just make a scene look realistic and more natural--not unless you project it on a giant IMAX screen and sit exactly at the sweet spot. Under any other conditions, it looks goofy, unnatural, and distracting.
There's no way to fix it. Four people sitting in a four difference seats in a live theatre have eight eyes and views the scene from 8 slightly different points of view. Showing the person in the left seat of the fifth row the pair of images that would be seen by a person sitting in the center seat of the twentieth row isn't going to work. If there are four people sitting in your living room in four different chairs, they need to have four different pairs of image shown to them, a different one for each seating position.
Re:3DTV here to stay (Score:1, Informative)
Our retinas are actually 2 dimensional and receive only two dimensional inputs. The only reason we 'see' in '3D' in the first place, is because our brain can infer depth from shadows, lighting, and other effects. Try covering one of your eyes. Your perception of the exact placement of things changes a bit, but you lose only a small amount of your depth perception, depending on each eye.
You don't go "OMFG, EVERYTHING WENT FLAT!".
You see in 2D and your brain translates that into something approximating 3D to begin with.
Re:Consumer upgrade #4231844 (Score:4, Informative)
Dont equate Blu-ray with 3D TV...
1920x1080p Blu-Ray Discs are incredible. I would never want to watch 720x486 NTSC SD interlaced footage EVER again. I work in post production/special fx, so i'm a videophile.
3D is a gimmick, but resolution is not a gimmick. Resolution is very important. Just turn on any HDTV sports broadcast and compare it to old SD sports broadcasts... Its not even choice, you have to watch the HDTV broadcast because the SD is just so pathetic.
Resolution increases are not the only benefit of Blu-Ray or HDTV... but also improved sound streams, uncompressed audio streams etc.
So support Blu-Ray... get out there and buy them because many HDTV cable/sat providers over compress their HD signals, and anything streamed over the net is equally over compressed. The best way to get a nice high bitrate, clean 1080p video is still on a disc. If we let Blu-Ray die... we let mediocre, sub par quality win.
Re:thrusting (Score:5, Informative)
It's been around since the early-to-mid 50s, not long after colour became cheap. Queen Elizabeth's coronation was filmed in 3D. Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder was filmed in 3D. You may or may not recall a character in Back to the Future (set in 1955) who wore 3D glasses everywhere as a nod from the filmmakers on just how trendy it was at the time.
What's new is digital cameras and digital projection (because synchronisation was always the hardest technical challenge) and cost-effective circular polarising filters which allow 3D movies to be seen in full colour in both eyes.
Re:Too Scared To Not Try (Score:2, Informative)
So what 3 D format is the PORN industry going to use? That'll be the winner....
Re:thrusting (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry to break it to you, but 3D was THE dominant form of visual home entertainment from the 1860s until about 1915. The Holmes stereoscope was found in almost every middle-class household, and the production of stereo cards was big business. Visit the Library of Congress Stereograph Cards [loc.gov] site to get an rough idea of the popularity of the art form.
As for 3D movies, there have been five major waves of popularity:
For recent films, you must distinguish between movies specifically photographed in 3D, such as Avatar, Coraline, and any of the computer-generated animated films, and the synthetic 3D done in post-production, like most of the really crappy cardboard-cutout abominations out there now.
3D isn't going to go away, although its popularity may wax and wane. Personally I hope this time it's finally here to stay. There are always idiot filmmakers going to throw things at the screen, and idiot studios who think you can use a computer to make a 2D movie 3D.
There have been less than a hundred movies originally filmed in 3D (not 2D conversions) since the invention of the cinema. It's an expensive process that requires a director able to visualize in three dimensions. How many silent films were made before we got Griffith or Eisenstein or Lang?
Re:Consumer upgrade #4231844 (Score:1, Informative)
Same thing with TV to HDTV (Score:5, Informative)
When HDTV came out, there were a lot of production problems revealed. I remember one of the first CSI episodes where George Eads looked orange. Reason was not that he'd overdone a tan, but that they used really intense makeup. NTSC has much poorer colour handling, so makeup was overdone. HDTV is better at dealing with colour capture and transmission.
When moving to a new technology flaws in your old process can show up.
Ya (Score:3, Informative)
To me, a more convincing 3D tech was one demoed at TED. It was a head tracking technology that did just what you describe on a normal 2D display. In fact when the tracker was on a TV camera, you could see it on video. So no depth like you get with a 3D display, but it looks better and needs no glasses. Of course it only works for one person.
I'll personally be sticking with 2D displays for now, until something better comes out.
Re:thrusting (Score:3, Informative)
Actually polarized viewing of 3D has been around since at least 1936 [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polarized_3D_glasses](see history). A bigger advance was made in the 1980's when IMAX started A) paying proper attention to the detailed mathematical accuracy required and B) had enough breadth of image to show interesting 3D content. But you are right about the digital technology aspects, which have arrived only in the last decade or so.
Re:Too Scared To Not Try (Score:4, Informative)
Dude, if you saw my mother, you wouldn't make that joke. She's fucking hideous, and a bitch to boot. You'd probably rather stick your dick in a blender than her mouth.
Actually, the blender's probably safer, too.
Re:Except it isn't 3D... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:thrusting (Score:4, Informative)
And this depth is a known problem with filming.
It's because the lenses that the cameras use have limits to their depth of field that cannot really be overcome without artificially altering the film itself to give *back* the lost depth of field and focus, especially at low lighting, that we normally see with our eyes.
What made Avatar so great from a visual perspective was that it gave the film a *realistic* depth of field as if you were looking at it in real life instead of the flat, blurry, and out of focus way that film tends to look. We've just become so used to the way that film looks that we're desensitized to it and think that it's "correct". The reason people thought that it wasn't anything special was because they were expecting "3-D" type cheesy effects instead of a barely noticeable but correct "fix" for the problem of flat projection surfaces and optical limitations of the lenses(cameras as well as the projector itself).
But to adequately pull this off, it almost has to be done at the pixel level so that it's not noticeable(the difference between Avatar with the glasses off and on while watching it was barely noticeable other than the increased depth of focus). This means non-digital filming will always look poor and incorrect. But digital filming is still horrendously expensive. Kind of a catch-22 for the next few years until it becomes affordable to shoot in digital.
Re:Except it isn't 3D... (Score:5, Informative)
You sound as if you knew what you are talking about, so I take it to try to answer your message.
Disparity is the most important factor in 3D perception in the human visual system
No doubt. This is why 3D 'works'.
Motion parallax however, cannot be achieved, since hidden content cannot be interpolated. It actually is unknown, eventually to both viewpoints. Even if it is known to one, depth remains unknown.
Head-mounted devices are worse, because for nobody the world doesn't turn when (s)he turns the head. You follow with the shown perspective, I guess. But from where do you get it? Think about a movie: Where do you get the information from, when the viewer turns the head?
Vergence and accommodation (focus) are secondary and always overridden by the other factors; this is a neurophysiological fact
Yes, see above. Override, though, does not mean trashed. It remains a sensory effect, that contradicts at least a distance virtually 'close' according to its disparity. -> Headaches.
How does a microlens array induce physical distance (adaptation)? You'd need a set of screens at various distances form the viewer's eyes, and using a shutter mechanism to project specific pixels from a 'credible' distance.
Physiologically, if you inhibit head/eye movement totally, the vision disappears altogether, as you probably know. So we all perform small quantities of those all the time, unconsciously. That's fine for a 2D-display (as I wrote elsewhere in this topic), because that's what we are aware of: a 2D-projection on a plane of finite, if not very limited size. Our brain 'expects' what it gets from watching a picture, or your 2D flat screen. Even a 3D-effect (compiz, e.g.) is nothing but a calculation of virtual distances and structures, projected - visibly - on a 2-dimensional screen. So our eyes get what they expect, with respect to convergence, parallax, focus, etc.
Not so, however, if you add real depth/disparity; but none of the others. Tiny, maybe subconscious, movements of eyeballs and/or your head do actually 'explore' the depth; not so in any 'disparity-is-everything'-projection system.
As long as we don't have a projection that makes appear an object in a real 3-dimensional space (what in theory a laser could do), so that the room is real, with a virtual object of real 3 dimensions projected into it, headaches will be the order of the day.
Re:Except it isn't 3D... (Score:5, Informative)
That's not "real 2D", that's single-view 3D. Because you cann move your head around off-axis, thus changing your viewing direction in 3D.
He doesn't say stereovision is worse than 2D, in fact it's somewhat better than 2D, by fixing one of the shortcomings (in the theoretical case where you double the bandwidth of every stage, rather than frame-alternating at the same frame rate, using leaky separation (e.g. anaglyphs), etc.), but way worse than true 3D, which resolves (almost) all of those.
Essentially, 2D is a perfect rendering for a viewer with fixed focal length at one point in front of the screen, and distorts as you move away from the viewing point, or focus at a different distance (which you've no reason to do).
Stereoscopic is a perfect rendering for a two-eyed viewer, with fixed focal length, a fixed interocular vector, and a fixed location in front of the screen. It breaks down slowly as you move both eyes away from the viewing point, and more rapidly with changes to either the length or angle of the interocular vector (humans have a fairly tight range of interocular distance, and that distortion is relatively benign, but head-tilt is a killer), and of course with the varying of focus (which is now a problem, because you're wired to focus at the same distance your eyes converge at -- with careful processing, this dissonance can be minimized, but there's more chance for things to go awry).
True 3D, means different things to different people -- one definition permits headtracking with stereoscopic display, which instaneously gives a perfect rendering for a two-eyed viewer, with fixed focal length, measured interocular vector, and measured location from the screen (which is typically a virtual image from a pair of goggles, but can be a screen with polarized/shutter goggles). This fixes everything except focal length, and there's even the possibility to measure and compensate that in real-time eventually. The good news is that this is technically possible right now, and relatively close to economic possibility for home users. The bad news is it's limited to one user per goggles/tracker/etc., and even CPU power goes linearly with the number of users -- it simply doesn't work for cinemas, at all, ever.
The more restrictive definition of true 3D encompasses volumetric displays, holograms, and the like -- it requires real-time simultaneous viewability from all positions in the designated viewer volume. Unfortunately, such things for entertainment purposes are a good ways out, though small and low-res volumetric displays are already on the market for technical applications (and priced accordingly...). The good news is multiple viewers add essentially no cost, but the bad news is that costs are through the roof, and even a decent resolution 3D stream requires the Devil's own bandwidth.
Re:thrusting (Score:3, Informative)
Funny enough, even Avatar contains shots that are 2D to 3D conversions. These mostly in the last part of the final battle. Weta Digital did those and they may still have a short breakdown video on their homepage which proves that. The trick they used was to time-shift the same take to get a fake stereo effect out of it. I'm still surprised that this is working at all.
Re:Except it isn't 3D... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Poorly aimed vitriol (Score:1, Informative)
Wasn't that why Star Trek the original series had everything in bright block primary colours only?
IIRC, the colors chosen for things like uniforms for TOS were picked specifically so that they'd be distinguishable even on black-and-white TVs. Otherwise people would have no idea what "dying of redshirt disease" referred to.
Re:Except it isn't 3D... (Score:3, Informative)
"true 3D" which you refer to is what we call volumetric 3D. Something we all want.
Stereoscopic 3D is what is currently being sold right now, it has its limitations, especially in the domestic environment where you are close to a small screen, compared to the cinema where you have a large screen far away. With cinema, your eyes converge straight forward and focus at infinity, and the image also converges to the same point in space so you have a natural perspective and depth perception. In the domestic environment, you have different sized screens are sit relatively close (and at different distances) to the screen, so you no longer have a natural perspective (eyes converging, image is diverging), giving head aches. You can't fix this, unless you do an online edit for each individual with different sized screens at different distances.
I hope Sony with their Playstation 3 let you input your screen size and sitting distance for gaming.