tequila bomb

Television and laptop makers are trying to make 3D displays which can be watched without wearing 3D glasses – the thought being that the glasses may put a lot of people off 3D TV in the home.

But there are rumblings which suggest that 3D may have bigger problems – with holographic TV planned to be its successor.

On a holo-TV, images will be projected into the middle of a room as a “cloud” that can be viewed from every angle without 3D glasses, and manufacturers hope they could go on sale in 2012.

Spencer Kelly took a look at an early prototype.

Impressive stuff. I’d hold off until 2012 for this technology, rather than buying a headache inducing “3D” TV today, that requires a headset.

It is worth noting that 3D TVs today rely on technology that doesn’t work for around 12% of people, induces headaches in others, and perhaps harms the eyes of youngsters.

Where as Holographic 3D actually solves the very problem that respected movie makers (correctly) claim is the biggest issue for 3D today. An issue which is also the reason why it doesn’t work for some – and gives others those headaches.

The upside is that content produced today for existing 3D technology will still work with Holographic 3D tomorrow – only better!

Thanks to @jonrandy for the heads up.

The biggest problem with 3D, though, is the “convergence/focus” issue. A couple of the other issues — darkness and “smallness” — are at least theoretically solvable. But the deeper problem is that the audience must focus their eyes at the plane of the screen — say it is 80 feet away. This is constant no matter what.

But their eyes must converge at perhaps 10 feet away, then 60 feet, then 120 feet, and so on, depending on what the illusion is. So 3D films require us to focus at one distance and converge at another. And 600 million years of evolution has never presented this problem before. All living things with eyes have always focussed and converged at the same point.

Consequently, the editing of 3D films cannot be as rapid as for 2D films, because of this shifting of convergence: it takes a number of milliseconds for the brain/eye to “get” what the space of each shot is and adjust.

And lastly, the question of immersion. 3D films remind the audience that they are in a certain “perspective” relationship to the image. It is almost a Brechtian trick. Whereas if the film story has really gripped an audience they are “in” the picture in a kind of dreamlike “spaceless” space. So a good story will give you more dimensionality than you can ever cope with.

So: dark, small, stroby, headache inducing, alienating. And expensive. The question is: how long will it take people to realize and get fed up?

Walter Murch is perhaps the only film editor in history,” Wikipedia observes, “to have received Academy nominations for films edited on four different systems:

• “Julia” (1977) using upright Moviola
• ”Apocalypse Now” (1979), “Ghost” (1990), and “The Godfather, Part III” (1990) using KEM flatbed
• “The English Patient” (1996) using Avid.
•  “Cold Mountain” (2003) using Final Cut Pro on an off-the shelf PowerMac G4.

Wikipedia writes: “Murch is widely acknowledged as the person who coined the term Sound Designer, and along with colleagues developed the current standard film sound format, the 5.1 channel array, helping to elevate the art and impact of film sound to a new level. “Apocalypse Now” was the first multi-channel film to be mixed using a computerized mixing board.” He won two more Oscars for the editing and sound mixing of “The English Patient.”

He’s right. I quit working in Virtual Reality back in the 90′s because the technology just wasn’t ready yet.

My issues with that technology then are similar to Murch’s now, and I have been quoting from part of them as recently as when the Wii appeared.

Lag is another big issue for VR (of any kind). Tracker lag (be it head or hand tracking), which feeds through the control system into the simulation and is translated a fraction of a second later into visuals. Consequently we end up with there being a disconnect between what we see in the headset compared to where your brain knows your head has actually turned to look. Or worse still the complete lack of change in what you see when you simply move your eyeballs.

You can get the idea of what I am talking about by simply playing a Wii game and observing controller lag; your hand waggling and your virtual sword on screen are very obviously not in sync. Or using any Augmented Reality app on a mobile device and seeing how slow the image is to catch up with where you turn the device to face. This is what induced motion sickness in countless numbers of people playing in VR machines back in the day. Imagine your entire vision being swamped by a “reality” a fraction of a second behind where your head knows it is actually looking. Another problem that 600 million years of evolution has never been presented with before.

Only now, some 20 years later, are we at the stage where Head Mounted Displays, computer CG hardware and tracking systems could perhaps approach the fidelity that makes that kind of vision of VR tolerable. But even still the eyeball moving problem exists for VR, as does Murch’s convergence issue for 3D. And both really are still a niche enthusiast driven form of media – which then and now big business are desperately trying to ram down your throat.

It will be a long long time before we have neural implants that actually immerse us in a virtual world. And the only other option is some kind of holographic imaging. Also a little way off, and something that comes with its own issues. A simple example is with Nintendo’s upcoming 3DS. 3D simply does not work when it is constrained by the frame of a screen – no matter how much many many game journalists gush about it.

Just like VR 20 years ago, 3D cinema and gaming is a fad that will pass, and we will all chuckle about in a few years time. Perhaps to revisit in the future when holographic imaging technology has caught up and we can dump the stupid headache inducing glasses, and expensive hardware setups that are required to even approach what visionaries hope to produce today…

Cameron’s Avatar will stand out for a long time as the only good example of a 3D movie. And that is simply because he threw everything he had at that movie to make it the best possible example of where we are technologically today with 3D. I still believe it was a huge success primarily because of the evocative story and fantastic visuals, which are much better appreciated in HD in any case. You simply see more, are immersed more, and enjoy the CG more on a good old fashioned flat HD screen.

In the meantime movie companies, technology giants and media moguls (who have a lot of money invested in this technology) will keep trying to sell 3D to you.

It would be much better if we got those companies to focus on good storytelling and original content, rather than another technological white elephant.

If you work in any field related to CG then this video is probably going to be more enjoyable than the movie “Tron : Legacy” itself…

A must watch eye-feast…

[W]atch an unusually long filament explode out from the Sun. The filament had been seen hovering over the Sun’s surfacefor over a week before it erupted earlier this month. The image sequence was taken by the Earth-orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) in a color of ultraviolet light specifically emitted by helium. The explosion created Coronal Mass Ejections which dispersed high energy plasma into the Solar System. This plasma cloud, though, missed the Earth and so did not cause auroras. The above eruption and an unusually expansive eruption that occurred in August are showing how widely separated areas of the Sun can sometimes act in unison. Explosions like this will likely become more common over the next few years as our Sun moves toward Solar Maximum activity.

Amazing when you think that that is actually a video of The Sun. An orb 100 times the diameter of our own planet. Or put another way an orb that could hold 1,000,000 Earths. That’s one big ‘filament’.

Amazing video.

The BBC’s online, on-demand video streaming service iPlayer will launch worldwide sometime early next year. Much to the dismay of expats around the world, iPlayer has been limited to UK residents, who pay a yearly license to watch BBC content. Now, the Beeb plans to launch a subscription-based service available to anyone, anywhere—with an Apple iPad.

From Ars.

You heard it here first…

I’ve actually been hearing, for quite a while, that Auntie Beeb is in talks with Apple. What will come of those talks is anybodies guess. Integration with Apple TV is a no-brainer though.

It’s common sense really. The whole look and feel of iPlayer is just a perfect fit for AppleTV, and iOS generally.

I hope it lives up to the video. And Richard Branson’s always loveable spin…

When my daughter Holly, who is Special Projects Manager at Virgin Group, first told me that she had agreed to sponsor an iPad-only magazine idea from one of our young entrepreneurs, Giovanni Donaldson, I thought she was talking double Dutch!

I wish Mr. Branson had an “older persons entrepreneur” scheme. I’d like to apply.

It wasn’t until Anthony, Gio and Holly showed me the amazing, innovative editorial and advertising in PROJECT that I ‘got’ how groundbreaking digital publishing can be. To be frank it blew me away.

Apparently the touch controls for the magazine require an instruction sheet. Which is worrying if this is aimed at your typical iPad user.

But content that updates throughout the month that each $2.99 issue is current sounds like a lot better deal than Murdoch’s 99 cent “Daily“.

UPDATE : Richard Branson Interview with CNN…

AirPlay Video is part of a public framework called MediaPlayer. This is the same MediaPlayer framework that developers use to show video in their applications. The current movie players ship with an AirVideo selection option built right in. The problem is that when you select AirVideo in a non-Apple application, the video continues to play on-device; only the audio is re-routed through the server to Apple TV.

That’s a big bummer, especially when applications like AirVideo and VLC are crying out for this kind of functionality.

But…

self.movieController = [[[MPMoviePlayerController alloc] initWithContentURL:[NSURL fileURLWithPath:CINDY_PATH]] autorelease];
[movieController setAllowsWirelessPlayback:YES];
movieController.view.frame = self.view.bounds;
[self.view addSubview:movieController.view];

Yes, it still won’t be App Store safe, but it’s jailbreak friendly, works flawlessly, and suggests only a single item that Apple could move to a public API to open up this functionality to developers. What’s more, with a little screen scraping or off-screen layer manipulation and a clever use of AVFoundation, you can probably have games working out to Apple TV almost immediately.

There is more background on this in the original article at TUAW.

Rupert Murdoch, head of the media giant News Corp, and Steve Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, are preparing to unveil a new digital “newspaper” called the Daily at the end of this month, according to reports in the US media.

The collaboration, which has been secretly under development in New York for several months, promises to be the world’s first “newspaper” designed exclusively for new tablet-style computers such as Apple’s iPad, with a launch planned for early next year.

Now we know what all the sucking up to Steve was all about.

According to reports, there will be no “print edition” or “web edition”; the central innovation, developed with assistance from Apple engineers, will be to dispatch the publication automatically to an iPad or any of the growing number of similar devices.

With no printing or distribution costs, the US-focused Daily will cost 99 cents (62p) a week.

This might actually fly. Unlike Murdoch’s “experiments” with pay-walls on his web based print media sister sites.

According to the US elite fashion industry journal Women’s Wear Daily, the Murdoch-Jobs “newspaper” will be run from the 26th floor of the News Corp offices in New York, where 100 journalist have been hired, including Pete Picton, an online editor from the Sun, as one of three managing editors. The editor of the Daily has not been announced, but observers are assuming it will be Jesse Angelo, the managing editor of the New York Post and rising star in the News Corp firmament.

What the Daily will need to do is make sure its content is fresh, and most importantly of interest to those who buy iPads.