I can see “magic eye” pictures just fine, but 3D starts giving me a headache after a few seconds.
I would be very surprised. Single image stereograms encode parallax differences into multiple alternating columns, requiring the viewer to uncross their eyes exactly the right amount so that one eye is over laying the odd-numbered columns over the other eye’s view if the even columns.
This is difficult because until you find the spot, there is no cue that there are two images there, and we are wired up to automatically focus on the image as a single plane with a single texture. It is very unnatural because we automatically correct for double vision by adjusting our eyes until we can resolve a single image, and a magic eye picture only works if we can force ourselves not to do this.
With filtered stereo, we have the usual cues we depend on (discrete images reaching each eye) and the image is designed with a natural and comfortable binocularity.
I don’t get headaches or nausea with 3D, and the glasses don’t bother me one bit. I hate 3D because it looks, to me, less realistic than 2D.
If 3D were cheaper than 2D, I’d pay the premium for 2D.
mmm
The few 3D movies I’ve seen didn’t seem to suffer from this “too dark” syndrome. I don’t know if this is because the equipment was just properly calibrated or what, but it didn’t seem any different in brightness than any other movie I’ve seen.
It varies by process. The original 3D depended on one part of the image being tinted blue and the other tinted red, which tended to darken both. Later efforts, especially on broadcast TV, tried yellow and purple, but the purple lens was so much darker that it drove me bats. Because a full frame for each color had to be printed anamorphically into the space usually reserved for just one frame, the picture also lost some sharpness, and gained extra grain.
The 3D movies in the theaters now are using filtered stereoscopy. The left and right lenses of the glasses are polarized, with the angle of polarization 90 degrees (I think) apart. Reflecting the picture off of the silvered movie screen in front doesn’t change the orientation of the plane of polarization, and because they’re at right angles, the two polarized images don’t interfere with one another. The information for each eye can be projected at the intensity you expect, without losing information to tinting in the shadows or blooming where highlights coincide.
I’m not generally a big theater person, so the first time I saw the polarized technique was actually some years ago in the Muppet attraction at California Adventure/Disneyland. I thought it was great stuff. Even when it’s not projected at IMAX resolution it’s still much clearer than than separating the data for each eye by color.
IMAX still uses linear polarizers as you describe, but RealD uses circular polarizers, which is better, since the effect isn’t lost if you tilt your head slightly (do that with the linear ones, and you’ll get ghosting). You still get loss of brightness either way, though, either a factor of 2 or a factor of 4, depending on how the projector is set up (I suspect it’s 2, since doing it the other way would mean dumping a bunch of heat into the projector filters, but I’m not sure on that).
It’s not the same as watching a stage play. In a play what you are seeing matches what is actually there. If something looks closer, it really is closer. In a film everything you see is exactly the distance as the screen, regardless of how far away it appears. If you’re sitting 50 feet from the screen and there’s an object that is made to appear 20 feet away, your eyes will naturally converge at a point 20 feet away. But the image is actually 50 feet away, so now your brain and eyes have to fight to focus at 20 feet but converge at 50 feet.
You don’t have to look very hard to find better explanations from people who have studied this more than I have:
http://sohooptical.blogspot.com/2011/01/3d-movies-may-cause-eye-strain-and.html
This isn’t even new information. These same points were raised during the big 3D scare of the 1980s.
So, I finally made it to The Avengers yesterday. The closest theater had both formats, but I picked 3D–my first time!
It looked just fine. The comic strip style, with lots of action & battles, came across great in 3D!
Did you see Thor 3D? If so was the 3D done better than Thor? Because that was honestly the only 3D movie I’ve seen in the past few years that I didn’t think was immensely improved by the 3D.
Saw TITANIC last month and it was so fake in 3D. After seeing it theatrically 14 times around 1998 as well as projecting it in large cinema, I was so distracted by the 3d conversion it was like watching cardboard cut-outs on the screen. I would rather had watched a punch and Judy show at the seaside than wear the RealD glasses for another 5mins I removed them and watched the film in super3Dblurred.
I hope 3D digital cinema goes into bankruptcy its the end of cinema as we know it. Projectionists are been made redundant and losing their jobs as digital cinema is a, load it up program the ads, trailers and feature and leave it be. Where is the art in that? Any bluray nerd can be trained to be button pusher.
Not interested in seeing Alien: Prometheus all I’d be doing is funding 3D cinema to stay in pocket when its crapped on the projectionists and the most of the general public. 3D will and always be 50% or less of the market and filmmakers like James Cameron trying to force 3D on us with a conversion what is going though his, mind, I thought he was, “I’m the king of world”? He’s ideas will get a lot of projectionists laid off what an ass.