Did you read the sentence before the part you quoted?
Bosstone is acknowledging that 3D movies are not perfect, but pointing out that when it comes to entertainment technology people don’t sit on their hands until utter perfection comes along. They go with whatever is good enough to make money off of.
I’m not a “basher,” I just don’t see the point in paying an extra $3 for something my occipital lobe will do for free.
Peeta answered it already, but to clarify, I’m not analogizing TV to movies, I’m analogizing TV – specifically, the technology that allows us to display moving images on a 2D screen – to 3D. The tech became mainstream when it hit a point that the populace found acceptable and worth paying for, and from there it continued to improve. Right now 3D tech is at a point where people are willing to pay for it. It’ll continue to improve, and possibly quite quickly now that there’s actual money in it.
I understood Peeta’s clarification, but now I’m confused again. TV didn’t become popular because of improved picture or sound quality, it became popular as soon as manufacturing could churn them out. TV was introduced at the 1939 World’s Fair, but manufacturing was delayed by the war effort. Not by people waiting for the picture to get acceptable.
Meh. I suppose I could go digging and turn up examples of early attempts at moving pictures that were only useful as curiosities but not popularly accepted, but that would be going too far off track. Regardless of the validity of the analogy, the point remains that the 3D tech that exists now is selling, which means it’s worthwhile for companies to pursue even better tech, both as an upgrade to sell to people who are already buying into the tech and to reach areas of the market that still aren’t buying. Maybe it really is a fad and people will just stop buying 3D altogether, but if not, it will continue to evolve and refine.
And if they ever start releasing general movies only in 3D, and continue charging more to see them because they’re in 3d, then I will stop going to see them in the theaters entirely, and wait until they come out on DVD. I don’t think that 3D enhances the value of most movies enough to justify the higher cost.
I will be very surprised if they even try to push 3D for anything apart from “spectacle” (heh) movies and animated features. I doubt anyone sitting in the audience for Mike Leigh’s Another Year is going to be thinking “It’s too bad this isn’t in 3D.”
After the initial investment, the only thing keeping admission prices up (apart from “All the market will bear”) is the extra expense of providing the glasses. I think more and more people may opt to buy their own glasses. There are some very nice options coming out, though the cost is still a bit bleeding edge. When it’s less than $50, I will splash out for some less-dorky/more comfortable/slightly brighter glasses, for sure.
That seems to be exactly what the 3D proponents in this thread are arguing. They say 3D is the future just like color tv replaced B&W tv for every show, not just the spectacles.
I don’t see anything that might reasonably interpreted that way. To say that it will be a persisting technology and that its implementation will improve doesn’t mean that we expect total ubiquity; you can make an analogy with an earlier technology without insisting on it being absolutely isomorphic.
For sure, colour films were “HEY LOOK! COLOUR!” at first, and it’s natural that after the novelty wore off and the process became more economical we would see a more naturalistic use of colour. And yes, the costs/benefits eventually became such that shooting in black and white became the “gimmicky” approach, and colour is taken for granted. I don’t think this means that eventually *all *films will be in some flavour of circularly-polarized stereovision.
Works for me. As long as 3D is relegated to mindless summer blockbusters and cartoons, I’m aces.
And I’m (not really) surprised that all the people who have trouble seeing 3D seem to post on the Straight Dope. In real life, I’ve never heard anyone say they either can’t see 3D images or that it gives them headaches.
Fred Norris on the Howard Stern show has complained that he can’t perceive 3D technology because of a condition in one of his eyes, so at least one real person does.
Yes, for sure- but ~99% of the population has stereoacuity fine enough to resolve variations of 40 seconds of arc, so it isn’t surprising that it doesn’t come up much, day-to-day.
Wow, that article contains dangerous levels of wrong.
It’s true that stereopsis is still developing in toddlers, and they are vulnerable to permanent developmental damage below the age of 5 or 6 if they are exposed to the wrong sort of stimulus for extended periods - but the wrong sort of stimuli are those from which you can’t extrapolate anything from parallax differential. (eg; Johnny wears his Captain Feathersword Pirate Eye-patch all through playschool, and John the accountant has no depth perception. Little Suzy has no correction for being wall-eyed, and Susan the beautician has to rely on touch cues to make sure her nail lacquer ends up just so.)
Also, nobody is going to feel sick from using a 3DS - this phenomenon occurs when your brain can’t reconcile visual information with what your inner-ear is telling you. A little hand-held device is not going to take up enough of your visual field to trigger this sort of effect, and 3D has little to do with it, anyway.
Concur. They always seem to include at least one poke in the eye shot in a 3D movie.
And I agree. This is a development in cinema technology that, unlike colour, or surround-sound, etc, is not accessible to, or comfortable for, such an overwhelming majority of the audience.
The only place I’ve heard any widespread complaining about 3D is on the boards, FWIW, so I really don’t think it’s “An overwhelming majority of the audience”.
Indeed, I don’t have a high opinion of marketing geniuses, but they’re not that stupid. There certainly isn’t enough over-enthusiasm for 3D on the part of its (one would be forced to believe) vanishingly small aficionados to make up for the supposedly vast majority of the public who purportedly actively dislikes it.
We’d be seeing 3D movies with somewhat fewer than half the viewers of 2D movies. And thus leading to less total revenues even when you take into account the increased ticket price, and all for a more expensive movie to produce.
Again, movie execs might not be the sharpest bulb in the shed but they’re not stupid.
Regular 2D games can cause seizures. They just put those warnings on there to cover their asses.
Other than hanging out on the Straight Dope, where is this mysterious “overwhelming majority” of people who can’t see 3D? Doing a brief Google search brings up many articles saying that the percentage of people who can’t properly see 3D images is between 2-10%.
(For comparison’s sake, 7-8% of men and .4% of women are color blind.)