When I first saw 3d in theme parks like Terminator 3d it was amazing how stuff was in my face and was jumping out of the screen at me. I could almost touch it. But when I saw Avatar or My bloody valentine 3d etc. 3d effect is limited to a depth of inside of a box. It just depth beyond the screen like in brodway theatre. Why is that. Is that the 3d I'm gonna get with my newly ordered LG 3d monitor? Is that the 3d effect in games?

Actually, the 3D you get at home with games (at least on the PC) are a better than movie theaters in a lot of ways. This is due to the fact that you can adjust the settings yourself for the game, and get greater depth or out-of-screen effects (on certain games). But overall I'd say the 3D looks more impressive than the stuff you see in hollywood movies. The directors are very conservative with the 3D.

Thx for the replay, you're as always first to help!
I'm glad to hear that it seems as 3d effect will be better at home than what I get in movie theathers!

Could you briefly list at least few of those "certain games" that can have out-of-screen effect?

And do you know why movies in theatres don't go for that out-of-screen effect, yet in theme parks they go for that.

The main reason is because the out of screen effects can cause higher eyestrain, and more people are likely to get headaches. You only have to watch for a few minutes in a theme park, but movies last for hours! Plus, even if 20% of the people in the audience at the theme park have eyestrain issues, people will still go to the park for other reasons. If 20% of the people seeing a 3D movie got eyestrain, it would probably have disastrous effects on box office sales.

So for the forseeable future, we are stuck with minimal 3D effects in movies.

It is mostly related to the zone of comfort for stereoscopic viewing, which is restrained by the vergence-accommodation conflict. When viewing stereoscopic content our eyes focus on the screen plane but they converge on a virtual point at a different distance. This creates a conflict that doesn't exist in real life, hence producing visual discomfort and fatigue.

For out of the screen effects in cinema, the corresponding value for disparity between left and right images has been found to be somewhat similar from both stereographers experience (2-3% of screen width) and recent research in this field (3-4% of screen width). That's the reason why recent movies don't use many out of the screen effects, or for short periods only.

You can find a complete study about these numbers in this recent publication :
http://www.journalofvision.org/content/11/8/11.full

Out of the screen effects also tend to break the suspension of disbelief, which shouldn't be a problem in a ride movie but could break immersion in a feature film depending on how it's used.