Meant to be Seen

So why will 3D content never take off? It's not the silly glasses or the lack of content. It's not even that we all kinda hate it. According to Academy Award-winning editor Walter Murch: it's evolution, baby.

Murch, writing to renowned film critic (and prominent 3D antagonist) Roger Ebert, says that 3D's primary failure is our own eyeballs. Specifically, how millions of years of human development have taught them to focus:

The biggest problem with 3D, though, is the "convergence/focus" issue. A couple of the other issues — darkness and "smallness" — are at least theoretically solvable. But the deeper problem is that the audience must focus their eyes at the plane of the screen — say it is 80 feet away. This is constant no matter what.

But their eyes must converge at perhaps 10 feet away, then 60 feet, then 120 feet, and so on, depending on what the illusion is. So 3D films require us to focus at one distance and converge at another. And 600 million years of evolution has never presented this problem before. All living things with eyes have always focussed and converged at the same point.

It's not that we're incapable of this optical trick—which Murch likens to patting your head and rubbing your belly at the same time. It's that it's hard. It gives us headaches. It makes us queasy. Every time we encounter a 3D effect, our brains need a few milliseconds to figure out the dimensions of each shot. Repeated for every edit over the course of a 90-minute film, and our eyes and brains tire out.

If anyone would know, it's Murch; he's the only film editor in history to be nominated for an Academy Award for work done on four different editing systems, and he counts Apocalypse Now and The English Patient among his credits. He's even edited a 3D film! So if his final takeaway is that the technology is "dark, small, stroby, headache inducing, alienating"? I'm gonna listen. Especially when he's got evolution on his side. [Ebert]

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spxder wrote:You know what? Your all retards. 3D is bad ass! Just because your sorry stomaches can't handle it. I saw Avatar in RealD 3D and it was awesome and looked great! If you think less then you have some issues. Period. The more people invest in 3D and it's movies, the more advanced it will get and soon you won't have to wear those stupid glasses which wouln't be so bad if they were designed to look better and made universal (ie. oakley sunglasses designed to also be used in theatres.) It pisses me off when you rant on something that could change the way we watch movies, drive cars, play games, etc. Stop bitching about it and make it cool so it could evolve and stop comparring RealD 3D to that stupid red and blue crap that doesn't work!! If you don't think 3D is cool then go watch your stupid 2D crap and shut up!

tritosine wrote:BTW what the heck is that horizontal strobing? 24hz?

android78 wrote:this guy makes some very good points... but in my opinion, getting used to the difference in focus to convergence is well worth it. Its not that different to when you start wearing. prescription glasses.
One solution to this would be to dramatically increase movie brightness and wear pin hole glasses. I wonder if anyone has tried this?