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Television Technology

3D TV Tells You Everything About This Decade's Tech (wired.com) 196

Posted by msmash from the a-look-back dept.
You don't need special glasses to see what it looks like when smart people run out of ideas. From a column: The breakout hit of the Consumer Electronics Show in 2010 was a television set. Hard to believe now, maybe, but it's true; for one shining moment, the Toshiba Cell TV was the most exciting new thing in tech. Its name invoked the overkill processors inside. It was one of the first sets to promise "Net TV Channels" that would let you stream directly from Netflix or Pandora. And it could show pictures in three dimensions. [...] Five years later, 3D TV was dead. You probably haven't thought about it since then, if you even did before. But there's maybe no better totem for the last decade of consumer technology. It's what happens when smart people run out of ideas, the last gasp before aspiration gives way to commoditization. It was the dawn of all-internet everything, and all the privacy violations inherent in that. And it steadfastly ignored how human beings actually use technology, because doing so meant companies could charge more for it.

What I remember most from those press conferences in 2010 was the assuredness that millions of people somehow actively wanted to have to put glasses on their faces in order to watch television. Even then, it made no sense. TV viewing has always been a large passive experience, something to do while you're doing other things. And besides that, only certain types of shows -- movies, maybe some sports -- actually benefited from 3D in the first place. Or would, if the television sets were any good; most of the early ones stuttered and flickered even when you sat dead center in front of them. Stray a few feet to either side, and the viewing angle shot the experience altogether. It gets worse. Different manufacturers backed different 3D TV formats and technologies, meaning one set of glasses wouldn't necessarily work on a competitor's set. The simple act of watching in 3D caused eye strain in a significant chunk of the population. And the list of available things to watch never hit critical mass.
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3D TV Tells You Everything About This Decade's Tech

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  • Can't remember if it was this decade... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Viol8 ( 599362 ) on Tuesday December 31, 2019 @12:36PM (#59573738) Homepage

    ... but does anyone remember active photo frames? Apparently people would want to spend a large chunk of money on some underpowered embedded arm computer in a photo frame format that you'd plonk on your mantlepiece/table/toilet and watch slowly cycling through photos you had to laboriously upload to it.

    I only ever met one person who bought one and he only bought it for its tech, not function and it soon headed off to the loft AFAIK.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by jythie ( 914043 )
      Heh. I can actually recall when those started showing up and thinking 'huh, I could think of interesting things to do with that if you could jailbreak it and display something else'.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Well those original ones sucked. Like you said, hard to upload, hard to manage. But the current ones - Nest Home Max or the Lenovo variant that just load photos from any Google Photos album and also let you set timers, alarms, calendar items, see the weather, watch Netflix or Youtube, and control your Smart Home devices are awesome.

      This is just like the original MP3 players sucked terribly and had almost non-functional software to copy songs to them. Then the iPod came out and it mostly just worked. Same i

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        This is just like the original MP3 players sucked terribly and had almost non-functional software to copy songs to them. Then the iPod came out and it mostly just worked.

        Yeah, right:
        Cheap MP3 player: drag and drop tracks from PC to player.
        iPOD: Install crappy complicated inflexible iTunes software, profit.

        I like the way that, even 20 years later, I can *still* just drag and drop music files from my PC to my Android phone. It just works. I don't want some compulsory piece of shit app 'managing' my music.

        • I remember my brother's which had only 64 MB of memory. From what I remember you had to rip the MP3 with their own proprietary software straight from the CD and only that software could download it to the player. Because it wanted to do DRM it would only let you download it to the player a couple of times as "checked out" and you had to use the software to "Bring it back" because if you just deleted it off the player itself you could easily get it into the situation where it thought you had downloaded to so

        • Still, iTunes works, and I have not found an easy to use podcast+music software that is nearly as intuitive and easy to use. I mean podcast management should be amazingly simple, and yet there are not decent software packages that do it from a supported reputable source (not counting shareware, build-it-yourself open source, etc). Easy, grab new episodes, sync to device when asked, remove older played episodes automatically, and put things in nice configurable playlists. Drag-and-drop is NOT a solution h

      • Well those original ones sucked. Like you said, hard to upload, hard to manage.

        My family got one in 2010, and my recollection is very different.

        Here is how it was managed:

        1. Put photos on an SD card
        2. Insert the card into the slot on the side of the frame

        I can't imagine how they could have made it any simpler.

    • Re:Can't remember if it was this decade... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Ost99 ( 101831 ) on Tuesday December 31, 2019 @12:50PM (#59573788)

      My parents have a new photo frame. It's brilliant for them. Doesn't look like the early ones at all. It's got almost no back light and the picture quality is not dependent on viewing angle at all. Looks like a framed photo (you have to get really close to see the difference), and changes photo every 1-2 minutes.

      It's a great way for my sister and I to send them pictures of the grandkids.

    • Samsung has not abandoned the idea. Recent Samsung TVs have an "ambient" mode (with dedicated remote button for it) where it can display the weather or some of your photos. So your photo frames have become the 55 inch TVs of today.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

        Now that's a dumb idea. Particularly when one of the photos it can display is a picture of the wall behind it.

    • I don't think the idea is particularly bad, just the implementation isn't there yet. I suspect the required features are no power cord, long battery life (6 months or more on a single charge), resolution on par with a print photo and probably not backlit. I don't know of anything that meets all of these requirements though, so plain photo prints are currently better.

    • Re:Can't remember if it was this decade... (Score:5, Informative)

      by MobyDisk ( 75490 ) on Tuesday December 31, 2019 @01:32PM (#59573912) Homepage

      Your comment intrigues and confuses me. Are you talking about these things [bestbuy.com]? You say "does anyone remember" like they are old. And $0 doesn't seem to me to be a "large chunk of money" Or maybe I'm just sour cuz I bought one and you made me feel dumb. I have found lots of uses for it. One is on display in the apartment of an elderly relative and I update it periodically since they don't use the internet. Another one is in our living room. I've also used it for fundraisers to play a simple picture slideshow.

      But yes, I would love to hack it. If you give it a 12 megapixel JPEG it spends like 2 minutes rescaling it down to 800x600. I'd rather it downscale then overwrite the image on the flash drive. Better yet: downscale it automatically when I copy the file. It doesn't rotate or crop pictures well so I have to do it ahead of time. It doesn't work with progressive JPEG files (what the heck library did they use? They were supported by the reference libraries back in 2000!) I bet with some work a malformed JPEG could totally root the thing.

    • I only ever met one person who bought one and he only bought it for its tech, not function and it soon headed off to the loft AFAIK.

      I purchased one of these for an experiment in learning.

      My thought was that you could display information that you wanted to memorize in the background, such as foreign language words. Occasionally you could glance up from your computer display and watch a word (followed by its definition) or two go by, and eventually learn the syllabus.

      (I have 330 wallpapers installed on my computer, and even randomly chosen they're all familiar by now. I have 691 *albums* in my music directory, and most of them are familia

    • I bought a used one at Goodwill. Plug a $15 memory stick into the back. and it just works. I just wish it had WiFi or Bluetooth to make things a bit easier, but once the stick is loaded up, there is very little reason to change anything on it.

    • I have one somewhere. An honestly why not. They weren't expensive, sure as hell not a large chunk of money (actually my frame cost me less than it would have cost to take 3 rolls of film from negative to print, so a bit of perspective is in order). I don't know anyone who had one on a mantelpiece or toilet. I've only ever seen them in offices on desks.

      The only reason I don't use it anymore is because I no longer have a fixed desk at work.

    • I still have one but it's called an Amazon Fire 7 tablet and it has a photo slideshow as the lock screen.

    • I bought one of those (or was gifted it - I can't remember exactly). I had it on my desk for some time. The photos would always be way too old because I wouldn't remember to upload new ones. I still have it - in a drawer somewhere. It wasn't a horrible idea. It was just one of those "halfway good" ideas. A decent idea hobbled by either the poor tech of the time (unable to download new photos automatically) or by poor implementation (making it difficult to upload photos). A photo frame that loaded photos fro

    • It was a great idea, but smartphones ruined it. If your photos are on your phone, they need to have a way to get to the frame without some laborious process. I never really used one, but now that I have a Google Home device it's everything that a photo frame should have been. Pulls photos from my Google Photos (auto backed up from phone), but only ones that have faces of friends and family in them. Now, it may not be the best choice for privacy - but the end result is very convenient.

    • Active picture frames proliferated because they were dirt cheap to make. Millions if not tens of millions of laptops are thrown away every year due to the hardware being obsolete. But most of their screens are still good. The people making these picture frames simply bought the screens from recyclers (usually for much less than the cost to manufacture a new screen), combined it with some electronics to display pictures off a microSD card, and sold it at a 10x or 20x markup.

      They may not make much sense

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by murdocj ( 543661 )

      Actually a good device for elderly grandparents who want to see pics of the grandkids or the latest trip but don't want to deal with tech.

    • Remember them? They're all over the place and more popular than ever. The ones today are cheap, have nice displays, small or even nonexistent bevels, a lot more storage, and can usually take at least a 128gig micro SD chip. The nicer models are very thin, and can be easily mounted on a wall without looking stupid.

    • I have 3. All of mine are wifi connected to various Google albums. One of them is in my mother's house 1,000 miles away.

      With a couple of clicks I can upload new photos of her grandkids to her.

      Yes Facebook is cool, but not everyone wants facebook. Also she never knows when new images show up. So it is a surprise

      The SD card photo frames though are basically useless. Then again most things that need SD cards are useless.

  • PIP (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ellbee ( 93668 ) on Tuesday December 31, 2019 @12:38PM (#59573746)

    The best TV feature from the 90s (before HDTV!) was 2-tuner picture-in-picture where one could watch one show over most of the screen and have a second in a corner icon, swapping between them when desired. Today we have multi-tuner DVRs and enough bandwidth for multiple simultaneous streams, but somehow this oft-used function has been lost. I'm sure there's a vile commercial reason behind it.

    • This appears to be an option on many TVs, and you can add it on with cheap 4-way HDMI splitters on amazon that let you do the inset, or multiple partitions of the screen up to quadrants like split screen. It actually makes a good argument for 4K since now you can have 4 1080p streams up at the same time.

      Its *almost* as good as the 9 screens at a time in Back to the Future 2.

      • That would be very destracting. The only places I can see this being used is in video editing and CCTV, but those systems split the video before feeding it into the monitor.

    • In the 90s I bought a Phillips Magnavox 32" TV for $500 (on sale!), and even paid extra for the model with PiP. I never used PiP. At all. I did at least try it out a couple times, but it turned out to be something much less useful in practice than in theory. While we can pretty easily determine what we see by controlling what our eyes are looking at, we cannot easily hear what we want to hear when there are multiple audio streams going at once. So right there that kills the usefulness tremendously - two

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by antdude ( 79039 )

      I remember asome TVs could do more than 2!

  • 3D TV was sabotaged (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Cyberax ( 705495 ) on Tuesday December 31, 2019 @12:39PM (#59573750)
    I like 3D TV. It definitely improves immersion. I bought a smart 3D TV around 2015. Unfortunately, there was absolutely no 3D content for it on Netflix or Roku. The only way to watch it was through physical BluRay disks on my XBox.

    Needless to say, it did not get much use, although I now do have a collection of around 20 BluRays that I will not be able to use again once I throw away my XBox.

    • So many screens are 120fps or better. there's no reason that TV's couldn't just have some standard signaling for shutter glasses and you do what you want in the settings.

    • I do remember the push for 3D gaming too. PS3 had about four or five games compatible with 3D TVs. As usual, they had problems due to performance limitations of the games. Xbox had no support for 3D TV. PC had support from Nvidia, but not every game supported that. I mean that some games were impossible to play due to the fact of the HUD and other 2D overlays not having the correct depth. A funny thing is that you could even use the red/blue glasses (out of the 50s) if you want to try before buy. Still, you

      • I had a 3D television (I think all of the higher end TVs supported 3D at the time I bought it) and a PS3 with one of the Killzone games (can't recall which) that supported 3D. I decided to try the game in 3D because, why not, I had all the necessary kit. It was awesome. Every time I reloaded the rifle would come up right in front of my face and the "depth" of different opponents in the field of view was really immersive. I tried a few 3D blue-rays as well, but never really got into them. I wouldn't min

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

      I have a TV with 3D support but I rarely used it, I did watch a 3D Men In Black once, but it was disappointing to see that they hadn't taken care of all the parts that were in green-screen.

      So the fall of 3D is basically that it requires a lot more from the movie creators and therefore makes the movies a lot more expensive. TV shows had to improve as soon as HD TV appeared - makeup became more important. Also all the backdrops requires better work than bleak quickly thrown-together paintings.

    • " 20 BluRays that I will not be able to use again once I throw away my XBox" Are the discs really locked to the hardware? If so, this is bad, and not really different from the late 1990s DIVX players (after the discs were unlocked for unlimited use)

    • I actually have tracking numbers for blu-ray copies of Captain Marvel and Endgame in 3D, both of which we just ordered last week. Sadly, Disney stopped offering 3D versions in the US a few years ago, so I've started having to import blu-rays from the UK, where Disney still sells them in 3D (and region unlocked, so no difficulty there). We don't use the 3D feature of our TV very often, but it's a fun change of pace on occasion, especially when done well, and a lot of the Marvel films (though not all of them)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sjames ( 1099 )

      It wasn't really sabotage. More like the network effect in reverse. Few cared for the feature given the constraints, so there was little incentive to produce content for it. Because of that, there was little incentive to develop techniques in cinematography to use it effectively so it was mostly amateur hour.

      Consider, even on the big screen where people aren't expecting to also carry on casual interactions while watching, 3D never caught on as anything but a novelty.

      The closest thing to sabotage is that the

  • "Smart" TV Tells You More than 3D (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Kunedog ( 1033226 ) on Tuesday December 31, 2019 @12:50PM (#59573784)

    You don't need special glasses to see what it looks like when smart people run out of ideas.

    Maybe they're out of ideas that benefit the customer, but they still have plenty that benefit the manufacturers, studios, and tech giants. The leash of forced updates, spying and ads (and everything horrible about phones) has been ported almost unavoidably to TVs.

    Thats the real story of TV tech for the last decade or so.

  • missed the mark (Score:4, Insightful)

    by sdinfoserv ( 1793266 ) on Tuesday December 31, 2019 @12:56PM (#59573808)
    3D TV was not a bad idea, it was cool; BUT 3D TV failed because it caused eye problems. http://berkelyeye.net/3d-visio... [berkelyeye.net]
    The failure of 3D was a rush to market before research of exposure was performed.
    The real failure is people not remembering history correctly - like your article.
    • It also failed because 3D at home doesn’t give you the same depth budget as the cinema does. That’s a physical limitation imposed by the viewing distance. The incredible immersion that Cameron achieved with Avatar could not be reproduced at home, sadly. People would love to have 3D at home if they’d get that level of immersion, but instead they got an amusing effect.

      And that’s another failing of 3D, it turns out it’s not that easy to use the medium to its best potential. Cam

    • It's not a good idea. 3D was a fad, and I think most people know it was a fad. All the in-theater 3D movies were actually not helped by being 3D (except for those so bad that being in 3D was the only thing making them worth watching). And an in-home screen won't get you that 3D cinema feel unless you're spending huge amounts of money. It was never going to be a mass market thing like the marketing seemed to imply.

  • 3d didn't add much if anything to the TV's themselves, just the glasses. I'm glad they tried, how else are things supposed to advance? And, claiming that something is obvious in retrospect is about the cheapest form of punditry / self-deception. Let's see your predictions for the next 5 years and revisit them in 2025, shall we?
  • Imagine you have a bunch of 2D paper cut-outs, in front of or behind other 2D paper cut-outs. The cut-outs can move around relative to each other, and the images on the cut-outs can animate -- but they themselves stay 2D. That's what '3D TV' looked like. It was a far cry from going to the movie theatre and watching Avatar. It was cheesy and underpowered and required finicky '3D glasses' that had LCD panels in it, that would alternately open and close in sync with alternating frames on the TV. Closer to a st [wikipedia.org]

    • Imagine you have a bunch of 2D paper cut-outs, in front of or behind other 2D paper cut-outs. The cut-outs can move around relative to each other, and the images on the cut-outs can animate -- but they themselves stay 2D.

      I tend to feel that way about most "post-production" 3D movies. It's particularly noticeable when you have digital characters and backgrounds that actually look pretty good because the rendering gives you real 3D data. Then they stick these 2D cardboard cut-outs in front of it.

  • People misunderstand 3D (Score:5, Insightful)

    by joe_frisch ( 1366229 ) on Tuesday December 31, 2019 @01:09PM (#59573850)

    I think a lot of people don't realize that binocular vision (which is what "3D" TV movies work with, is only useful to fairly short distances, 10s of Meters. This makes 3D useless for a wide variety of "spectacular" scenes. An image of mountains, aircraft combat, Godzilla sized monsters, or planets is not in any way enhanced by 3D - binocular vision is not useful at those distances. Unfortunately in response, media creators frequently "enhance" the 3d effect so that it is noticeable - but of course the human brain interprets the larger angular separation as the objects being closer and smaller The unfortunate result can take the form of inch-long spaceships battling for control of the viewers nose.

    Human depth perception is greatly enhanced by head motion - but that feature is not available in standard 3D TV or movies. So the 3D provides inconstant information to the brain.

    Parallax is very noticeable at close distances - but most media featuring shots in relatively small spaces, is not primarily visual - viewers don't go to see "My Dinner with Andre" for a spectacular visual experience

    That pretty much leaves porn as the only visually based media where the action is close enough to the viewer that 3D matters. It IS a very large market, but even so it doesn't seem to have caught on. (thought I think there is some 3D porn content)

    So IMHO, 3D was simply a flawed idea from the outset. Work on improving dynamic range, and frame rate would have provided an actual improvement in user experience, with none of the downsides.

    So I see 3D as a very specific problem, not an indicator of overall technology trends. Some ideas like 3D TV and flying cars are simply flawed in their basic conception.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by JMZero ( 449047 )

      HDR has been a core push on new TVs for years - I don't think most people care, but it's there. New TVs mostly support higher frame rates, but people don't like how high frame rate content looks (see, for example, the backlash to Hobbit - which to be fair was a terrible movie), so for the most part movies are still 24fps.

      3D could have been cool. It WAS cool for some stuff (sports, fish documentaries). But people don't like change, and they don't like incremental upgrades or features you only use some of th

    • I think a lot of people don't realize that binocular vision (which is what "3D" TV movies work with, is only useful to fairly short distances, 10s of Meters.

      It depends. Most people are able to perceive stereoscopic differences at ranges of 100s of meters (and some people are "stereoscopically blind"). The maximum interpupillary distance (IPD) in humans is about 77 mm (51 mm is the minimum), and 80% of people can perceive a 30 arc second difference. This makes it 77*57.3*120 = 530 m. With the minimum IPD 51*57.3*120 = 350 m. So 80% of people have stereopsis active out to at least 350 m.

      • I just did a test myself. I went outside and viewed the chimney of a house against a mountain backdrop, the house was about 100 m away (I know the lot widths here) and had no trouble at all in seeing the difference when switching from one eye to the other.

        • I saw
          https://jov.arvojournals.org/a... [arvojournals.org]
          Where there were some tests.

          Also testing under ideal conditions is different from the lack of depth perception being noticeable in a complex scene.

          It would be interesting to generate a 3D video, and have some object whos depth is "wrong" and see at what point its noticed.

    • The unfortunate result can take the form of inch-long spaceships battling for control of the viewers nose.

      I see this a lot. Fortunately, there's medication that helps it go away... :^D

    • That pretty much leaves porn as the only visually based media where the action is close enough to the viewer that 3D matters.

      Actually when you break down a typical action shot very few of them are actually shot from a distance with a large portion of shots being framed incredibly close to characters and action. Actually I'd argue further to say it's *too* close. One of the biggest gripes of Hollywood action films is the *lack* of the wide scenes you describe which would make 3D irrelevant, and with good reason. It's hard to fake action when the viewer has an overview (really go see how many movies cut the camera angle right as a

      • I might be much more willing to accept 3D if it wasn't exaggerated. Endgame for me was a great (eg terrible) example. I saw it in both 3d and flat. In 3d the 3d was so over-exaggerated that the grand battle scenes looked tiny. I remember the little few-inch long starship drifting in the void.

        Of course 3d or not, nothing could save the plot.

        It would be interseting to see a movie that was 3d but ONLY shot with normal eye distance and see if it added anything for me. Such movies may exist, I just haven't

        • Of course 3d or not, nothing could save the plot.

          A plot that closed off a 10 year long story with the most epic character development on the big screen staying very close to faithful to the comics and which was critically acclaimed? Is that the plot that needed saving?

          Opinions are like arseholes, everyone has one and many of them stink.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kackle ( 910159 )
      )

      Whew. Now I can close out the decade.

  • Count me (Score:5, Insightful)

    by argStyopa ( 232550 ) on Tuesday December 31, 2019 @01:18PM (#59573886) Journal

    ....as one of the naysayers that said 3d TV was stupid from the get-go.

    Perhaps a *teensy* bit more skepticism from the tech-adulatory press might go a long way?

    Things like:

      "Are we really that close to self-driving anything? I'm pretty sure that puttering around idealized environments is a pretty tiny fraction of the operating realm of conditions, weather, traffic, and humanity that such a system would have to handle dynamically 100.000% without warning or failure or it's worse than useless, to say nothing of the need to establish a completely new legal environment ex nihilo that satisfies criminal and legal standards of culpability and even moral questions?"

    or "Sex robots are exactly as threatening to women, and to the same men, as fleshlights, ie not to any degree worth caring about."

    or "I'm pretty sure we don't actually have anything that's actually AI by any real definition, anywhere, so wetting our panties over how it's going to change society is like getting upset about replicants, teleportation, or energy/matter conversion."

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by lgw ( 121541 )

      "Sex robots are exactly as threatening to women, and to the same men, as fleshlights, ie not to any degree worth caring about."

      Dude, the moment someone builds a fucking machine that can also open jars and kill spiders, men are obsolete.

      "I'm pretty sure we don't actually have anything that's actually AI by any real definition, anywhere,

      Sorry, "AI" now means this stuff that we actually have, machine learning and whatnot. It used to mean something different when only nerds cared about it; now it means this stuff. Exactly like "hacking". You'd do better to say "this AI we have has nothing to do with self-aware machines, at all, so ...".

  • I worked for Philips in Belgium at the time, that was the central hub for new TV technology. I wasn't a developer, but one of the configuration and build engineers.

    I distinctly remember an almost key meeting, where I, I won't say objected, because that was not possible, but told the other engineers that this would really bomb.

    The problem was that commercial pressure almost forced the company to add 3D capabilities to the then current TV sets.

    But in this case, having seen most of 3D technologies already (an

  • Not just 3D TV (Score:3)

    by Dan East ( 318230 ) on Tuesday December 31, 2019 @01:36PM (#59573932) Journal

    This isn't specific to TV. People simply have realized that... they just don't care much for 3D movies, period. To a large extent it is just novelty, and it comes with negative drawbacks (darker picture, having to wear glasses, eye strain, etc) that usually don't outweigh the positives. 3D box office income peaked in 2010, and has been steadily decreasing every year since. That peak was probably due in part because 3D was being forced upon us - I remember seeing multiple movies in 3D because it was not available in 2D at my theater, or it had every limited 2D showings.

    Here are the stats (21% of revenue in 2010, down to 12% in 2017): https://techcrunch.com/2018/04... [techcrunch.com]

    There is another major problem with 3D that I have talked about before, which is a biological issue with "fake" 3D that we have on TVs and in theaters. Our brains are hardwired to couple focus with depth. When we try to look at something close by, our eyes converge and they also focus for that closer distance. For something far away they diverge to parallel rays and focus for infinity. In a movie theater or on TV, the actual focal distance never changes - the screen is always the same distance away optically - however our eyes will converge and diverge to align the images as if the object was at various distances.

    So, our eyes try to perform in an unnatural way to not focus based on depth cues. Quite simply, this causes eye strain, which some people can't tolerate as well as others. Not exactly something you want to experience while trying to enjoy a movie.

    • This is my problem with 3D crap. My eyes get very upset when they can't focus on a blurry background in 3D videos. They also get upset changing focal distance when the subject moves in or out but the focal distance isn't changing. If I'm stuck with 3D video content (I'm looking at you rides at Universal) I go without the glasses and just deal with blurry video that doesn't make my eyes hurt.

  • Still works. It's about 4-5 years old. There's no more TV content for it, but it works fine with 3D Blu Rays. Unfortunately I now have to buy those from Amazon in Europe for the most part.

    I bought one with the passive 3D technology. It works great. The glasses are exactly the same as what you get in the theater. You can sit further off to the side and still see in 3D than you might think. People act like you need to be directly dead center for it to work and that is just not true. Unfortun

  • I think the point the post's author was trying to make is getting lost. It's not just 3D TVs...this decade was about data collection and getting consumers more actively interacting with tech. By 2010, at least the prosumer and hipster crowd all had a phone capable of running millions of data collecting apps. Now, everyone has one. Rather than invent new stuff, the push has been to get as much of the data from that portable computer you have in your pocket with all your sensitive info on it. It's just a bunc

  • Also... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Moof123 ( 1292134 ) on Tuesday December 31, 2019 @01:43PM (#59573960)

    VR: Same story, overhyped, under delivered. Mass appeal and exponential growth assumed for a niche product with a small but rabid cheering section.

    "Smart" EVERYTHING: Having to bust out my phone to change the lights, toast something, get juice from a juice packet, enable my bike lights (WTF?), and so much more just reeked (and continues to reek) of solutions looking for problems.

    • For VR gaming, I'll wait for those with too much money to fund development by buying the early prototypes and getting all the kinks out. I don't want a VR gaming system that's going to require you to run or move around, though that could have niche uses (ala the wii). I wouldn't mind one where I can sit down, then move my head to look around while still using a reasonable control system (same as a PC or console).

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by vix86 ( 592763 )

        The kinks are out of the systems now, based on my experience with a Valve Index recently. The main barrier are actual games to play (vs tech demos) and the combined cost of the VR unit and the system you need to drive the unit.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by vix86 ( 592763 )

      After playing around with Boneworks and a Valve Index this past Christmas, the main thing the market is missing right now is just cheaper headsets that don't need insane hardware to drive them; and games to actually play -- not tech demos.

  • One thing that has happened with TV screens in the last decade though is that mainstream TVs have about doubled in size.
    I bought a 32" in 2012, which was a modest but common size back then, and there was maybe one expensive 50" TV at the highest end. 720p screens still existed.
    Now, most models are 55", and you can get a 65" UHD TV for what a high-end 32" FHD TV cost back then. (yes, same aspect ratio)

    But people don't watch "television" the same on these larger screens as before. They watch movies, and they

    • I just bought a 32" for my mother (biggest that would fit into the nook). She thought it was an extravagant purchase, but it was cheap though I was disapointed that I couldn't find a dumb-tv version (so I expect to get lots of phone calls when something doesn't go quite right when she uses the wrong e remote). She won't be streaming though, not enough bandwidth and it would take forever to try and explain it to her.

  • Downfall of 3D TV's should have been obvious to anyone that bothered to actually try the technology out. I still have one high-end 65" 3D TV and a 3D projector on a 12ft cinema screen from that era (because it was hard to buy anything remotely decent a decade ago without 3D on the spec sheet).

    Watched about one 3D thing on each throughout the decade of ownership. The projector runs half as bright when in 3D mode (which sucks extra hard for cinema projectors, as those tend to be low-lumen to begin with). T

  • 3D TVs may have failed, but that is hardly a reflection of tech in the past decade which has seen an ever increasing set of new things brought to market some of which even getting mass adoption.

    Maybe someone needs to see a doctor and get a prescription for some anti-depressants.

  • ... to give new things a fair shake. Oculus VR games are absolutely more engaging, immersive and even physically stimulating than TV and game pad. And 3D movies grow on you if you explore a variety of content that takes full advantage of the format. There is certainly more visual difference between 3D and 2D than between 4K and 1080p. But people are just wedded to exactly the current experience and are not willing to put up with some rough edges of something new. In the same way as most Americans never get

  • I have a small 3D monitor with glasses and while it does work, it totally sucks compared to watching 3D on a Sony PSVR. Sure the resolution could be better ( it's 1st generation after all ) but I don't notice that unless I intentionally look for the pixels. The overall experience with PSVR and decent headphones is like a cross between 3D and a home IMAX.

  • >"Five years later, 3D TV was dead. You probably haven't thought about it since then, if you even did before."

    Wrong. I like 3D movies (when they are done well). I specifically bought an expensive 75" 3D TV in 2015. And I purchased many 3D bluray movies. I was and am happy with the outcome, except the lack of more 3D titles.

    >"millions of people somehow actively wanted to have to put glasses on their faces in order to watch television."

    I already wear glasses all the time. So does probably half the

  • I bought a new TV last year and was disappointed that 3D was no longer an option. My friend has a fantastic 3D TV. She rarely uses the 3D option but when a good movie like Star Wars Rouge One that uses 3D well it is awesome to have that option.

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