3D photography is a hobby of mine and I don’t think Cameron understood it at all visually. He may have spearheaded the hardware but he completely missed the mark. He missed some spectacular opportunities to wow the audience. It may have been deliberate due to computer processing time and if that’s true I apologize in ignorance.
Could you give an example? Reading that sentence makes me think of those idiotic “He’s throwing a baseball RIGHT AT YOU!” moments, but I assume you had something better in mind.
I think I’m in a minority of one - but I didn’t find the visuals all that interesting. There were too many CGI rendered 3D bits that just looked flat compared to live action 3D. Was no better than a good anime like Akira or Final Fantasy to my eyes. I did enjoy watching it though and have seen it a few times on 3D bluray.
there are 2 scenes in the movie that actually made me groan. The scene when they were walking through the operations section with the curved holographic screens, and the scene when they were flying on the backs of the winged creatures.
We can only perceive depth out to a few hundred feet. So the closer an image is the more pronounced the effect of depth when looking at flat stereoview images. The cool factor of the holographic screens would have been more pronounced had they switched to 3D. The same for the flying scene. Looking at from the 1st person perspective would have been much more dramatic then from afar. This may not be possible because the images are passing on either side of the perspective view so I’m not sure there is anyway of displaying it in 3D. The problem here is that the effect can only occur in front of the viewer and an audience is looking at a screen in a panoramic manner.
Not sure I’m explaining this correctly but turning your head should change perspective and that can’t be changed because the camera view is fixed. The image to be projected in 3D is fixed in one position but when projected on a screen is so big the viewer has to look left/right to take it all in. This is why it will never seem real to watch using dual flat images.