The modern systems don’t care about the orientation of the filter, since they use circular polarization.
If you put a circular-polarization filter on the camera, you’ll get a single 2D movie. If you use two cameras, with opposite circular filters (like the two on the glasses), then you’ll get two slightly different movies, which you could (with the right equipment) use to reconstruct the 3D. If you use a single camera with no filter, then you’ll get a 2D movie with ghostly double images, slightly different, of everything, same as if you try to watch the 3D movie without the glasses.
I think that “gimmick” (at least the way some posters here have used it) has a more pejorative connotation, i.e., something that is perhaps flashy and attention getting, but essentially unnecessary, and providing no real value. I don’t happen to accept that definition as applied to 3D.
While it is true that exhibitors certainly want to get people out of their houses, the studios who make the movies are as concerned about DVD sales as theatrical income, if not more so. So they are pushing for home 3D systems, too, since you can bet that when 3D DVDs come out, you’ll pay a little extra for them, too.
For me, “gimmick” is evocative of movies like The Tingler, with “Percepto!” (As if Vincent Price hamming it up with intravenous LSD wasn’t enough to get people in the door, without a joy buzzer applied to the ass.)
It will be interesting to see what hardware gets the sort of penetration to make home 3D a serious market. I am eager to plunk down some cash for an high-refresh-rate LCD monitor/shutter glasses combo, but can admit that this solution isn’t ideal. (It’ll still be a step up from what I’m using now, which is software that displays field-sequential 3D files as red/blue anaglyph, on the fly.)
If it were available, I’d much rather have a projector (or even rear projection system) that would allow the use of passive polarized glasses.
Westinghouse is working on a passive, glasses-free 3D display (sort of a lenticular-printing-ish LCD) which sounds neat in principle, but doesn’t sound like it would be practical except for solo use, and I’m skeptical about the image quality we might expect from this approach.
RealD’s consumer solution (a huge active filter on the display) appears to work great, but I think the price point is unlikely to come down to anything that begins to make any kind of sense for average consumers.
I’ve got one and the shutter glasses can’t get entirely opaque so you got a double shadow left & right of any really bright object on a dark background. It only happens on the really high contrast areas. I don’t know if that would be a big deal to you but it’s annoying enough to make me start to regret the purchase.
There’s also an LCD that can work with passive polarized glasses, the iZ3D. I considered it when buying the system i got but i can’t remember why i chose the shutter system.
Thanks for that - I’ll be careful before plunking down my cash. I’m sure even at that, though - it’ll be better that colour-filter anaglyph, though.
From their “Test your 3D vision” section:
[quote]
[ul][li]Center your nose over the brown eye below.[]Focus your eyes on the single brown eye.[]Put your free thumb in front of your nose.[/ul][/li][/quote]
Uhh… huhh… huh…
Hi, everyone. I’ve got a bit of a dilemma: my 7 year old son has been invited to a friend’s birthday party, where they will be taking the kids to see the 3D version of the movie “G-Force”, and my problem is that I think my son may be stereoblind (he had surgery when he was 1 for strabismus, and had to wear a patch on one eye for hours every day, for years. He is no longer cross-eyed, but his ophthalmologist said that it is very possible that he may never have true 3D vision, a.k.a. “steroblindness”.) My concern isn’t really that he won’t get the 3D effect when he sees the movie- it would be perfectly fine if the movie just looked to him exactly the same as the standard 2D version. Rather, my worry is that the movie will look messed-up to him (like for example, as if you looked at those older 3D images without the glasses that had one lens green and the other red, so that you saw all the extra red and green on the image. So basically I’m afraid that since his eyes won’t be able to process whatever extra stuff is added to the images to make them appear 3D, the added 3D stuff will instead totally screw up the appearance of the movie to him.) By any chance, is there anyone out there with steroblindness who has seen a recent 3D movie, and can describe what that experience was like? Thanks!
Also, if for any reason he can’t resolve the images, he should wear his eye patch under the 3D glasses. That should take care of the problem. He’ll only see 2D, of course, but only one image, not two combined.
Thank you so much, GuanoLad and commasense, for replying to my question. That’s a tremendous relief, that in all likelihood, the movie will at least be normal to him. And I will definitely also have him take his eyepatch with him in case that turns out to be necessary, just to be on the safe side (thanks for that tip!)
