SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Back in 2010 Sony Australia's Paul Colley forecasted that a large percentage of Australian viewers would have 3-D televisions by 2014.
In the same year, industry pundits such as Simon Murray predicted that sales of 3-D TVs were set to increase in the years to come.
But others were heralding the death of 3-D TVs and this year the remaining major manufacturers, LG and Sony, have said they will no longer produce 3-D-capable televisions.
So despite all the repeated push and positive predictions, what went wrong with 3-D TV?
Tim Alessi, LG's director of new product development, acknowledged this year that:
[...] 3-D capability was never really universally embraced in the industry for home use, and it's just not a key buying factor when selecting a new TV.
Sales of 3-D TVs have been in decline for several years, according to data from analysts NPD. In 2013, 3-D TVs accounted for 23% of TV purchases in the United States, but this dropped to just 8% in 2016.
Is 3-D TV dead, or will it rise again?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by DannyB on Thursday February 09 2017, @04:55PM
The same thing went wrong that was wrong with 3D at movie theaters.
It's a gimmick. Often to raise the ticket price. While there might be some brilliant rare film makers who are exceptions, the 3D films do not really use 3D to tell the story. The 3D does not contribute to the story telling nor the plot in any significant way.
It may actually detract from the movie experience.
Now apply this to television.
What captivates you, generally, are the characters. Their plight. Their conflicts. Maybe their heroism and courage. Or maybe how funny they are in the context of the plot.
Now imagine a really good, glasses free, 3D experience you can see with the naked eye. One that genuinely lets you perceive the 3D ness of the characters, props, background, etc. While it would be visually an improvement (if it were to exist this good) just like 4K is a real improvement -- the improvement itself doesn't really tell the story any better. You might have enjoyed a movie just as much on DVD versus today's most eye popping way of presenting it. Why is that? Obviously you might not enjoy it as much on NTSC (never the same color, not the smartest choice, etc). But once you see it on something sufficiently good, let's just say DVD, then at that point huge improvements in the presentation technology don't really increase your enjoyment all that much.
This is probably the reason why 3D is dead.
Will it rise again? Well, they say disco is coming back. And I hear of Elvis sightings. So who knows.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Thursday February 09 2017, @05:12PM
Dog!!, every time i hear a song that is disco-ish, i have to stop listening.
They bring that back and you know the music industry is REALLY lost.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday February 09 2017, @05:17PM
VR (which is inherently 3D) could benefit from massive visual improvements, although better AI maybe some neural immersion could be even more important.
I agree that 3D can be a detraction from the movie theater experience, but it's far from dead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_3D_films [wikipedia.org]
37-38 films listed in 2017, including this gem [wikipedia.org].
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 09 2017, @05:20PM
s/book/movie/g
s/movie/3D/g
Of course it's a gimmick. It's a new technology. Give it a few more decades for the shiny to wear off.
With that said, I prefer books. I'll watch a movie every now and then, but only to relax with some pretty pictures. Yes, I liked most of those shallow superhero movies... It's when the movie starts getting all deep that I turn it off and pick up a book :)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 09 2017, @09:56PM
You're an idiot if you think that movies aren't better at telling certain kinds of stories than books. Movies are primarily visual and auditory in nature and are limited in that respect. You can't tell what people are thinking other than showing them doing things. But, you get a ton of options in terms of how the story is told. You get motion, lighting, sound and other things that language has a hard time communicating.
3D OTOH, hasn't yet shown that kind of potential. Nobody has figured out how to make 3D movies of things other than like plays and plays were something that could be readily handled with the traditional film making tools.
Perhaps in the future, there will be 3D movies that make full use of the technology, but nobody has managed to figure it out with enough consistency to make it worth while.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Thursday February 09 2017, @10:43PM
As Eddie Izzard said: you get a lot of car chases in films, but not a lot of car chases in books.
You can't tell what people are thinking other than showing them doing things.
You've not seen Dune, then? ;)
And isn't one of the rules of writing "show, don't tell"? I.e., don't write "She was angry." Write "She did X angrily."
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 3, Insightful) by wonkey_monkey on Thursday February 09 2017, @05:35PM
All the stuff about story and characters could equally be applied to the introduction of colour, couldn't it? Did they use colour to raise ticket prices?
The only difference is you, the viewer, didn't need additional equipment to watch a colour film.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 09 2017, @07:14PM
No, not the only difference. You forgot the eyestrain and discomfort.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday February 09 2017, @08:06PM
I believe that color actually does enhance the experience. Do you agree / disagree?
It would seem that most people agree. As evidence I would point out how most films went to color and color didn't die out as a gimmick.
I would offer as evidence how color tv didn't die out as a gimmick. In fact, color tv sets displaced the sales of black and white. This is the opposite of 3D TV which is dead.
As for your point about raising ticket prices, I wouldn't know. I'm not that old. :-) But I wouldn't be a bit surprised. Of course, once everything is color, then it becomes the norm. If people can't afford the higher ticket prices, then theater attendance declines. Just like any free market. But again, 3D seems to be having the opposite fate. Theaters continue to offer 2D showings of the same movie -- sometimes on even more screens. That right their says something loud and clear about 3D movies.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Thursday February 09 2017, @08:35PM
Agreed. The Wizard of Oz must have been mind-blowing, with their Technicolor [wikipedia.org]. In fact it's still mind-blowing 78 years later :-)
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday February 09 2017, @08:52PM
I mentioned above about some hypothetical brilliant film maker using 3D somehow creatively.
That is what The Wizard of Oz did with color. I don't think it was the only one, Pleasantville springs to mind, but it is rare.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 1) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Thursday February 09 2017, @11:51PM
From the wiki article:
3D is not new by any means.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Friday February 10 2017, @02:36AM
The main difference is that your brain tends to fill in 3D if it's missing, but is much less good at filling in colour. 3D isn't a binary thing. Your brain uses a lot of different cues to construct a 3D image and several of those are present in 2D cinema. From memory, so probably missing some, your brain uses stereo separation (different pictures in both eyes), relative movement (things in the background moving at different speeds), occlusion (things appear and disappear as things pass in front of them), scanning (your eye is constantly moving to give slightly different views of the scene), focal depth (how does your lens have to change to focus on different parts of the scene), and a couple that I've forgotten. You get many of them from a 2D film and you only get one more from today's 3D film. It's really a misnomer to describe it as 3D and this is one of the reasons that it's a problem: most people get motion sick if the cues don't agree and today's 3D crosses a line from where a percent or two suffer to where about 10-20% of people feel sick.
The comparison to colour is therefore a little bit misleading. A comparison to HDR would be more appropriate: we already have the equivalent of colour for 3D, the next change is simply providing a richer colour range.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Friday February 10 2017, @04:43PM
That's a good point and I'm going to steal it.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Thursday February 09 2017, @08:07PM
This is mostly my observation as well in the 3d films I've seen.
With exceptions.
The most notable recent exception was the Star Wars film "The Force Awakens", which I saw in theaters both in 3d and in not-3d.
The 3d allowed the sets to really shine, such as when protagonist Rey rappels down the inside of a derelict AT-AT ground fighter and the dizzying height of her climb becomes apparent (it wasn't, to me, in the non-3d film), allowing the film to tell a more detailed story in a more immersive environment. It was sort of like a writer saying essentially the same thing in more richly descriptive and engaging language.
If this was the norm for 3d, it probably wouldn't be in trouble.
(Score: 2) by linkdude64 on Thursday February 09 2017, @08:31PM
"Now imagine a really good, glasses free, 3D"
By the by, have you gotten your hands on a "New Nintendo 3DS"? The 3D effect and eye-tracking compensation is truly phenomenal.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday February 09 2017, @08:38PM
I'm thinking more along the lines of watching a 60 inch screen in my living room without glasses. :-)
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday February 10 2017, @02:51AM
That would be a hologram. I don't think we have high enough definition LCDs for them. Doing it in color would be problematic, as well, but I'm sure that could be gotten around. The actual filming would be the hard part, because the light has to be coherent (laser light). It would probably have to be done in a computer.
I thing the younger of folks here will own a holographic television some day.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Thursday February 09 2017, @10:40PM
What games take advantage of eye tracking? Many?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by linkdude64 on Friday February 10 2017, @07:08PM
It's actually tied to the hardware itself, and it works for all of the console's new and previously released 3D-supporting games and applications.
A bit of explanation:
The 3D effect (sans glasses) at 60Hz is achieved by switching between each offset frame of the combined 3D image at 120Hz. On the old 3DS, the distance between each image was fixed - you had to keep your eyes at the precise focal point to get the effect - which was difficult in practice. On the N3DS, there is an innocuous infrared LED (which means the effect works in low-light, too) that works in conjunction with a front-facing camera to detect the angle of your face relative to the screen, and depending on their position, offset the distance between the 2 images that comprise the 3D image in realtime so the 3D effect proves much more difficult to break.
It really is best seen in person if you are actually interested in the existence of the technology. If you happen to have a big-box store nearby with a display model, check it out! Sure, it is possible to easily break the 3D effect intentionally with unnaturally massive swings of your head, but in realistic playing situations it is more than sufficiently stable to keep it steady; Laying down in bed, sitting on a bumpy bus, in the backseat of a car, etc. it works very well.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 10 2017, @08:41PM
I own a 3DS and think Nintendo got it right for another reason also. The parallax vs focal distance of the 3D effect remains reasonable.
Parallax is how much your eyes have to look inward towards each other. Focal distance is how your eyes adjust to focus depending on distance. Normally these two do not deviate from each other. On a 3D screen, they can change the parallax but not the focal distance. This can cause eye strain and headaches. This is also why I prefer 2D tv over 3D tv.
Nintendo allows you to set how much parallax there is...you can select a value you're comfortable with. Also, nothing comes out of the screen towards you. Closer to your eye, the parallax the focal distance change much more with distance.
Nintendo does it right. It isn't annoying or distracting, it is immersive. It makes up for the low resolution. I like my 3DS, and I have a 4k tv hooked up to my gaming computer.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Friday February 10 2017, @09:48PM
So how does it make each image only visible to one eye? Is still a static parallax barrier, but the software in the newer model now knows when to switch left/right around, or something like that?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by linkdude64 on Saturday February 11 2017, @09:25AM
It doesn't block one image - the images switch quickly enough that they combine in your head. This is not possible with the 24fps in movies, but that's not the only reason it wouldn't work in theatres. The 3D effect with glasses uses polarized light only because it needs to be visible from multiple locations at once (as in a theatre) With a handheld console, only one person needs to see what's on the screen. Hence, no need for glasses, and their ability to accomplish the neat trick using a single (and now variable) focal point.
Just check it out already! :)
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Saturday February 11 2017, @02:43PM
A 3DS can't work that way - there'd be nothing to stop each eye seeing both images. You'd just see a flat image flicking between two slightly different perspectives. While this can be enough to give some 3D information, it won't look 3D any more than a photo with narrow depth of field.
It seems both old and new 3DS use an LCD parallax barrier, which the new version able to move the barrier to accommodate head movement, though details are sketchy and hard to come by.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by linkdude64 on Saturday February 11 2017, @03:08PM
Guess I was wrong in not checking my sources, then. Maybe you can find the patent? In any case, the technology is effective.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Dunbal on Friday February 10 2017, @12:36AM
Now imagine a really good, glasses free, 3D experience you can see with the naked eye. One that genuinely lets you perceive the 3D ness of the characters, props, background, etc.
It's called a play, and you can see it at your local theater.
(Score: 2) by lx on Friday February 10 2017, @06:01AM
Of course the 3D gimmick will rise again. It rises every other decade or so. Ever since stereographs were invented in the 1850s.
New generations need to first discover and then get bored with it like their parents and grandparents did. It's a cycle.