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!'"
Too Scared To Not Try (Score:2, Interesting)
SCTV is on the air! (Score:4, Interesting)
Not to mention, they can ruin your eyes. (Score:4, Interesting)
Fundamental problem: Close images far to one side (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the fundamental problems with 3D movies and TV is this: Close-to-the-viewer images that appear far to one side of the screen. The problem? You go blind in one eye. To create the appropriate binocular disparity, the "other" image would need to appear in a direction for which there is no screen, thus, no image is presented to one eye. The result is jarring and upsetting.
James Cameron seems to have figured this out in Avatar and avoided doing it for the most part.
How else to avoid the problem? Use a really big screen (in terms of angle subtended at the viewer's position) such as Imax. What does this portend for 3D TV? Nothing good, since TVs almost universally, even with "large" screens, do not subtend an adequate angle.
3D can be done right-- (Score:1, Interesting)
Since 3D is so new, many people are choosing to criticism the entire medium via poorly generated content.
There are soooo many ways to mess up the 3D experience its not even funny.. Nobody's been properly trained in the do's and don't yet.. and so much is being rushed to market.
but when done right it's truly a compelling experience.
It's not fair to completely slam the genre of theater after seeing a few badly written plays.
Some 3D *wins*
* taking 3d photos/video with a fujifilm w3 camera.
* street fighter IV via Nvidia's 3d-Vision
* Avatar (They always maintain a proper depth of field with proper levels of focus)
* Sonic Sega Racing / TrackMania
* PORN (adult4d.com) -or shooting your own homemade with the above fujifilm
But yeah.. everything else sucks and hurts your head.
hurts it BAD. :/
one last thing, 3d projectors are always better than TVs.. *no ghosting!
Acer 5360 only 600 bux.
Glasses = death of 3D TV (Score:5, Interesting)
People accept glasses for watching 3D movies in theaters because they are there for the experience of watching a film on a giant screen with other people while eating popcorn and drinking soda. The same goes for other specific, controlled environments, like 3D CAM in an office; people accept it as part of the experience (or job in this case).
3D in the home will never succeed until and unless glasses are not needed. It doesn't matter whether the glasses are disposable or expensive, or if today's multiple competing standards congeal into one. No one will accept needing to constantly put on and take off 3D glasses to watch TV. Period.
After seeing Avatar in 2D, you know. (Score:4, Interesting)
I sat a few of my friends down to watch some scenes from Avatar in 2D, and one of their jaws dropped at how much worse the CG looks. 3D corrupts the live actors just enough to make the CG look of similar quality -- when it's in 2D, that effect goes away. I didn't do this to rag on Avatar's CG, but to show them how 3D destroys image quality even on something that is filmed specially for it.
I'm not looking forward to the day when the first 3D-only movie comes out.
Re:lowering costs of HD (Score:1, Interesting)
The quality of video reproduction isn't anywhere close to that of audio reproduction. I don't think I've ever seen a review of an overpriced digital cable from a videophile perspective, since video reproduction hasn't reached the level where videophiles would start to care about ephemeral qualities. Instead they still worry about things like black level, brightness, colour fidelity, and motion resolution.
Re:Early days of stereo audio.... (Score:5, Interesting)
3D is the future...but it's not here yet. (Score:5, Interesting)
Accommodative input is the future. Period. We will eventually have technology which allows us to adapt content to the human receiver. This is not in dispute. Presentation and interaction methods which use these techniques well will dominate over those that don't. You can already see examples of this. The experience of watching a movie on a large theater screen is vastly different from watching it on a cheap 19" TV. Cruddy audio equipment doesn't have the same impact as a live performance. A real book is much easier to become absorbed in than the same content on most e-readers. Video games with poor camera behavior and non-intuitive controls aren't as fun to play. Psychologists and technologists have studied the hell out of it - immersion, emotional design, adaptive interfaces...they make up new names for different aspects of the problem almost every week. But for the most part, this is the future. There is a lot of promise, but for the most part we have to settle for emulating "real" versus contrived input and interaction to some functional level of fidelity which we can tolerate in order to pick up additional functionality (often portability) which the technological approach enables. Other cases do work better, but only if you're talking about expensive research prototypes which address a single aspect of a broader frontier.
The problem is that this leads to the mistaken assumption that our current implementations are accurate representations of their eventual successors. In most cases, they're not. 3D is probably one of the biggest culprits here. It's too easy to go "hey look, 3D displays - it's just like looking at real objects!"...but that's not really it. We've managed to come up with a number of technologies which give decent approximations of several depth cues beyond those available in a static 2D image (e.g. shadows, object occlusion, perspective methods). This is wonderful. But it's important to keep one point in mind, a point which is constantly overlooked.
All current 3D display technology falls well short of producing fully "believable" input.
Yeah. And that's setting aside the whole "movie producers keep producing trashy fake 3D pictures to raise ticket prices" issue - which is a major complication of itself. If you use good current 3D hardware to display a well-made 3D picture which was shot for 3D and where the medium was used intelligently...it will still degrade the image quality over 2D, people will still get simulator sickness, and a fairly large slice of your audience will even still see it in 2D.
The first problem, degradation, can be minimized through special screens and top-end equipment, but you can't really eliminate it since there it provides a much more complex problem compared to doing the same thing in 2D with the same grade of equipment - or worse (and more realistically), the same budget. This is orders of magnitude worse if you want your 3D installation to be a theater setting since you have to serve many people sitting at many distances and viewing angles, each of whom is using different eyes and different brains to process the input. Honestly, with any existing technology, the only thing you can do in a 3D theater is try to minimize how bad it is and minimize how much it costs you to set up. There is no good solution here. Polarized light projection is really the best way...but it's quite vulnerable to off-axis viewing. Alternating frame projection is better in that sense - off-axis problems are comparatively minor - but the headsets are quite expensive (polarized glasses can be effectively disposable) and many viewers will perceive constant flickering which is annoying at best but more likely a quick trigger for simulator sickness (above the already inherent risk with 3D from conflicting visual cues).
The second and third problems are more or less related. The human visual system relies on a large set of visual cues to create a 3D model of your environment, and stereoscopy is only one factor. Admittedly, it's a fairly major factor, and a
Re:thrusting (Score:4, Interesting)
We're in the "blue LED phase" of 3D right now, where everyone is using it just because it's new. Once the novelty wears off it will start to be used more sensibly. Although I'd argue that we still haven't reached that point with blue LEDs either :)
Yeah. A couple of years ago at work we installed a new HP inkjet printer in our department. It went into its internal diagnostic/setup rouitne, and a bright blue LED started going back and forth like a demented Cylon. We all stared at it in awe, until it finally stopped. Then one of the guys reached out and pressed the self-test button again.
However, I'd argue that 3D movies have already gotten past the blue LED phase. Certainly Cameron's Avatar was a highly engrossing (both to the viewer and the bottom line) film even without the 3D, and without throwing somebody's yo-yo in your face (like "Journey to the Center of the Earth", which was nothing but a vehicle to show off 3D effects and little else.) Of course, few filmmakers are of Cameron's caliber, and many just depend upon special effects to try and carry the day (yeah, Mr. Lucas, I'm lookin' at you.)
Hubble 3D (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Too Scared To Not Try (Score:3, Interesting)
Either R&D will grind along, driven by a mixture of long term optimism and the occasional big simulator/data-visualization/etc. contract, until they eventually hit on something genuinely Good which will then be accepted. Or(and I suspect this is more likely):
Victory will, eventually, be conceded to whatever 3D tech's panel, interconnect, and data storage requirements are most similar to those of the 2D market, and which imposes the smallest additional component cost to mark a device "3D Capable!!!". For instance, the active shutter glass stuff requires active shutter glasses(which sucks majorly); but otherwise works very well with the trends that are being driven by the existing 2D market: It throws away half your frame rate, so it can alternate eyes; but twitch gamers and action/sports enthusiasts hate blur anyway, so LCD refresh rates have been getting a lot better. It requires high speed interconnects, because of those high frame rates; but so do high resolutions displays, which are what keep the pros and CAD dudes happy, so all the display connection standards have very high speeds on the roadmap. Additional components cost? You basically just need to blink a few IR LEDs so that the glasses can sync. Maybe a few bucks on top of the existing stuff.
This doesn't actually mean that buyers of such "3D Capable!!!" TVs will bother to buy shutter glasses, or 3D movies, or even turn the option on; but the additional cost would be low enough to get very broad penetration without any real active consumer acceptance.
Think back to the early days of USB: Slow, virtually nothing to plug in to it and what there was was buggy, not even supported by the OSes that most people were running; but Intel put it in their chipsets, so it cost the motherboard maker peanuts to drop the passives and the connector on the board. Everybody had it before anybody cared.
Except it isn't 3D... (Score:5, Interesting)
With a real 3D display, there are so many things you could do... with stereo, you get exactly what you've been getting all along, that is, the single viewpoint they think you should have, and that's it. Yeah, you'll think you're perceiving depth, but that goes away the moment you move your head and the image doesn't change the way it should.
Because actual 3D isn't just about providing two different images (which is what stereovision does.) It's about providing the two images that match the viewing angle your position and head angle set up relative to the material being viewed.
Me, I'm good with 2D until 3D actually arrives. Stereovision... no thanks.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Except it isn't 3D... (Score:1, Interesting)
Consumer 3D is also not at the same capability ( just cheaper ) that it was at in the 70s or 80s. The sense of depth that can be achieved is directly tired to the resolution of the display being used. If you owned a 32 inch TV in 1990' with an optimistic 640x480 available resolution, you'll wind up with like, 50 grades of potential depth inside the screen.
It blows my mind that Slashdot, home of the "correlation is not causation" tag, would post anarticle with this title, based on some random boner's anecdotal experience. Clearly, stereo displays are stupid, look bad for all people at all times, and are not worth pursuing as a technology.
By all means, advise consumer's to demand a test of anything they're thinking of buying. Let them judge for themselves whether it works, and whether the probably future of the technology is worth the price hike. But this article, and all the other nearly identical articles floating around, are stupid and pointless.
Re:Too Scared To Not Try (Score:2, Interesting)
You know, I'm glad a publisher's trying to get Duke Nukem Forever out the door again. It allows such timeless jokes like this one to continue.
Re:Too Scared To Not Try (Score:3, Interesting)
While I agree with most of your post, I feel the need to get pedantic on one point...
Think back to the early days of USB: Slow, virtually nothing to plug in to it and what there was was buggy, not even supported by the OSes that most people were running; but Intel put it in their chipsets, so it cost the motherboard maker peanuts to drop the passives and the connector on the board. Everybody had it before anybody cared.
In the early days of USB, the choices were either serial (really really slow), parallel (regular slow), or SCSI (fast, but expensive, and manual mapping wasn't for the faint of heart). They all required reboots after installing things, and the number of expansion ports were quite limited. I remember sharing the serial port between my mouse and my Cybiko. Keyboard only syncing taught the keyboard commands REAL fast!
USB was indeed buggy, but also remember that there really wasn't such a thing as a class compliant driver at the time. Every USB flash drive of the era required a driver install, but it was a heck of a lot faster than a parallel Zip drive. When you have that many people writing a driver for a first(ish) gen technology for the Win98SE driver stack, that's inevitably a house of cards (especially since in my case my first USB experience involved a PCI card on top of it). USB really came into its own when USB storage, imaging devices, and other more generic types of devices started to work well with generic drivers.
Re:Too Scared To Not Try (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not sure this is true anymore. You're absolutely right about the porn industry being the decider in the VHS vs. Betamax war, but you have to remember that this was pre-internet. Do you think the majority of consumers get their porn on video or online at this point? That's not a rhetorical question, I don't know that the data's been gathered, and it's a rogue element that will have a big impact on how this new tech will play out.
Personally, I think this 3D shit is a gimmick and it'll all blow over soon enough so this kind of market share stuff won't even come into play, but it's worth thinking about.
Re:Glasses = death of 3D TV (Score:3, Interesting)
You know, that's a damn good point. Generally, when you go to a movie, you're there to *watch* the movie, so you don't mind glasses on your face so much. But at home? What if I'm laying down? Got friends I wanna chat with while the show's on, and look at them while I chat? Look away to grab the phone? Get up to answer the door? Grab a snack? Go to the washroom? Grab the remote? Read a book during commercials/dull parts of the show? There's dozens of little moments while watching TV that you're not going to be looking directly at the TV, and so how annoying are the glasses going to be for that?
Re:The brain doesn't like what doesn't make sense (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
This is why 3D gaming makes much more sense than 3D movies.
A lot of film techniques rely on changing between multiple cameras, and that dramatic, angled close-up that is so effective in 2D results in a depth-of-field change that's going to fatigue people in 3D. Many games, especially racing, FPS, and platformers, rarely do that sort of thing. 3D would add lots of immersion with fewer drawbacks. There's always room for abuse, but it doesn't seem as inherent to the medium as in film.
I think this could become more evident pretty quickly with the launch of Nintendo's 3DS, depending on how many developers they get on board.
Re:Remember the 1960's? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, and no. Your argumentation discards a relevant fact; one that you are probably not aware of.
Black and White photos are a proper representation, or mapping, of a 3-dimensional space on a 2-dimensional plane. Adding colour adds information. The human eyes can be tricked into perceiving a rate of above 16 images per second as 'motion', and an ever higher rate as 'smooth motion'. You add colour to it, everything fine.
Over the years, this has been refined, and we can all enjoy coloured moving images without trouble.
Stereoscopy as it is being done, cannot produce a proper mapping. (I gave some initial arguments elsewhere in this thread, so I don't want to repeat myself.) This is why 3D hasn't taken off despite of very early efforts, in red/green, of some generations earlier. The problem is not one of technology, resolution, not even left/right separation. The problem is, and there is plenty of research available if you are interested, that - contrary to the mapping of 3D to 2D - two cameras - even if mounted with the proper interocular distance - cannot map the 3D-impression properly into 2 electronic channels. Therefore, it is physically/biologically impossible to regenerate the original 3D impression with lateral cameras.
Re:thrusting (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not sure your post does what you want it to do, which is to assure us of the value of 3d in cinema. I would even go as far as to say that your post does the exact opposite.
3d within the context of cinema (including this latest attempt) has always looked terrible and added little to the experience aside from novelty; hence it's lack of perseverance in each era. There are certainly exceptions where you can point to a minimal amount of value added to the cinematic experience but these are exceedingly rare and have had minimal impact on cinema as a whole. I went to Avatar and Alice in Wonderland, both in 3d and felt cheated out of the extra money I spent for these experiences and like a sucker for being duped by this latest run of gimmickry that seems to pop up every 20 years or so (and no, I'm not one of those people that "3d" doesn't work on. It all jumps out at me, it just looks like crap when it does).
This latest run, just like all of the others, is just Hollywood trying to milk a few extra bucks out of people.
Re:thrusting (Score:5, Interesting)
MOD DOWN, INACCURATE
"aside from the fact that it's actually bad for your brains (esp. children's brains)"
This applies only to a single type of 3D technology tested by Sega involving two screens placed right on top of the eyes. There is no evidence to support problems with other 3D technologies and no particular reason to believe there might be.
They also make it annoying (Score:4, Interesting)
In the home, a TV is usually not in a special room, just for TV watching. Some high end homes have home theaters, but in most homes, even one with nice TVs, the TV is out in a public room. Ok well with any new 2D TV technology, this hasn't been a problem. People can wander in and out and they all see the same image. However with 3D TV, it is a problem. When the 3D mode is on, only people with the glasses on get a good image. Everyone else sees a blurry mess. So if you are walking through to stop and chat, it is highly annoying and the person watching has to either disengage the 3D, or you have to pick up glasses to fix the problem.
Probably be easier just to leave things 2D, over all.
Re:Amazing lack of foresight here... 3d will win. (Score:1, Interesting)
Newsflash: $4000 TVs didn't sell, only when they hit $1000-2000 did sales take off and today, I imagine anything over $1500 sells rather slowly. 3D TV feels much more like Blu-Ray to HD's DVD. DVD had higher res, but perhaps more important, you had a much better form factor, ease of use, and did not degrade from watching. HD had substantial footprint reduction (for fixed screen size) and weight reduction in addition to sharper picture even for SD video. Laugh if you want, but many a living room that could never fit a 40+ inch tube TV has a big flat screen hanging on the wall. In my family's case we went from 31" to 50" in roughly the same floor space. 3D could continue this trend (4-6" to 1") but that is nothing next to a 2-3 foot to 6 inch reduction.
Re:Except it isn't 3D... (Score:3, Interesting)
From Wikipedia:
Human vision uses several cues to determine relative depths in a perceived scene[1]. Some of these cues are:
* Stereopsis
* Accommodation of the eyeball (eyeball focus)
* Occlusion of one object by another
* Subtended visual angle of an object of known size
* Linear perspective (convergence of parallel edges)
* Vertical position (objects higher in the scene generally tend to be perceived as further away)
* Haze, desaturation, and a shift to bluishness
* Change in size of textured pattern detail
All the above cues, with the exception of the first two, are present in traditional two-dimensional images such as paintings, photographs, and television. Stereoscopy is the enhancement of the illusion of depth in a photograph, movie, or other two-dimensional image by presenting a slightly different image to each eye, and thereby adding the first of these cues (stereopsis) as well. It is important to note that the second cue is still not satisfied and therefore the illusion of depth is incomplete.
Stereo Beatles (Score:4, Interesting)
I tried visualizing the waveforms via Audacity:
My copies of Please Please Me and Hard Day's Night are in mono, but I notice a very pronounced difference in channels for Beatles For Sale, and only a slight difference in the channels on Help!
[Just tested track 1 of each album: I Saw Her Standing There, A Hard Day's Night, No Reply and Help]
Yes, I noticed that modern music tends to have less-radical differences between the channels; the first time I saw/heard noticeable difference between channels was earlier Zeppelin material - Whole Lotta Love, for instance.
I suppose, like any audio effect, it can be used effectively or ineffectively.
Re:The "sweet spot" problem and the "edge" problem (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Except it isn't 3D... (Score:5, Interesting)
Finally a great comment instead of all the pointless whining.
Just one thing to add: 3D in a movie theatre works pretty well, because distance to the screen (and thus the perceived scenery) is so large that movement of the head would not have much of an effect anyways, so it doesn't feel weird.
On your TV set, it would.
That's why 3D movies work, even though they aren't really 3D as you pointed out, but 3D TV doesn't.
Re:The "sweet spot" problem and the "edge" problem (Score:3, Interesting)
Though with audio it generally just sounds a bit different / giving effect in the direction of "lower" standard; not terribly obvious when not in the sweet spot.
With "3D" it's just more wrong (sweet spot is pretty wrong in itself...), not really in the direction of discarding "3D" & appearing flat.
Re:thrusting (Score:3, Interesting)
It's interesting to compare 3d video to that other technology nobody actually seems to want; video phones. They have a similar time lines, with video telephony starting in the 30's, and going through several waves of hype with little adoption outside the specific fields where they have some specific utility.
Maybe we'll soon see a great superimposed wave of 3d video telephony, coming to an abrupt end when the hobby of thrusting things in peoples faces suddenly becomes excessively obscene.
Re:thrusting (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't know about you... but I haven't seen any LONG TERM study about other 3D technologies (and I loked in Scopus, Scirus and Google Scholar).
And the only study made (by Sega) found that it is derimental for joung people... mhmmmm. I will wait thank you :)
Re:Amazing lack of foresight here... 3d will win. (Score:3, Interesting)
Uh, dude, 3D without glasses using as standard tech as LCD displays has been around for over a decade. Lenticular arrays and parallax barrier are very old tech by now.
Only really works well for a single person sitting in the sweet spot. That's a reasonable assumption for an LCD display, where use is typically solitary, but doesn't do so well with TV where there's more likely to be multiple people viewing it at once. (And of course it's useless for projection.)
Re:Except it isn't 3D... (Score:3, Interesting)