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.

[T]he killer demo is the telepresence. Obviously, there are safety issues involved with exposing subjects to lasers, so the imaging was done with regular cameras—16 of them, all using Firewire to provide something close to real-time performance. These were sent across ethernet to the display computer; the authors indicate that even 100Mbps has plenty of capacity to spare. At the receiving end, a desktop class computer reconstructed these into a 3D image, and used that to control the laser that encoded the image into the display media.

We’re not quite ready to see Princess Leia emotionally plead for help, given that the refresh rates are still a couple of seconds between frames. But the work at least demonstrates that the general approach is flexible enough to handle both long-lived displays and relatively rapid refresh, so it’s possible that a bit of further tweaking would improve its performance for one or the other of these, or get it to do something entirely new.

Cool technology. Looking forward to more news on this in the future.

If you want to find someone doing that kind of volume you’ve got to look outside the game business. At, say, Apple, which is pushing games on the iPhone and iPod touch. Apple sold more 14.1 million iPhones alone during the quarter ending in September.  “Do I think that in the near term they can hurt us more than Microsoft?” Fils-Aime says. “Absolutely.”

Interesting to see how Fils-Aime’s tune has changed subtly over the last few months.

Here’s where Nintendo has an edge, Fils-Aime says. The iPod and iPhone are great for casual games like “Angry Birds” that provide a welcome distraction. Games on the Nintendo DS, by contrast, can consume. Fils-Aime admits he’s spent 150 hours playing Nintendo’s Dragon Quest.

And he perhaps has a point.

iOS devs. (small and large) only have themselves to blame if he is right.

Developed by Disney/Pixar, Ptex generated a ton of buzz a couple years ago with its simple promise: no more UVs and no more headaches. It was like someone saying “self-cleaning apartment”—everyone wanted in. With Ptex, textures are parametrically stored per polygonal face and there are no visible seams.

Ptex is actually Open Source, and is making a splash in some big name packages at SIGGRAPH this year. Expect it to filter through to other packages in the not too distant future.

[M]ore than one in ten of us (12%) has a visual impairment that means our brains are unable to correctly process the individual images that are transmitted to it via our left and right eyes.

This leads to an inconsistency in viewing the three spatial dimensions (height, width and depth) required to enjoy 3-D films in all their glory.

This is a UK survey, but I assume the results are similar for other countries.

The results, collected during the last week of May, posit that 31 per cent of avid gamers intend to buy a 3D-capable console, and 27 per cent a 3D TV.

A fairly respectable percentage of gamers already have a 3D capable console, and can buy 3D games for it today.

Additionally, 25 per cent were planning on picking up a 3D handheld – the only option for which is, of course, Nintendo’s 3DS.

Consider that when you read Microsoft’s view on 3D :

If you look at the costs of entry into the living room and when that’s going to become mass-market, we think the offering with Kinect and the natural user-interface we’re bringing, that’s a more compelling proposition for consumers over the coming years than maybe looking at 3D at this point.

It’s the big E3 focus for Sony and Nintendo, but Microsoft UK boss Neil Thompson has dismissed 3D as “an interesting technology of the future” that’s still too expensive for consumers.

It’s official : Microsoft, on either side of The Pond, are into self harm.

“If you look at the costs of entry into the living room and when that’s going to become mass-market, we think the offering with Kinect and the natural user-interface we’re bringing, that’s a more compelling proposition for consumers over the coming years than maybe looking at 3D at this point.”

Expect a panicked launch of something crap before year end.

Technology research firm iSuppli expects about 4.2 million 3D TV sets to be sold worldwide this year at an average price of $1,768. That should rise to 78 million sets by 2015, worth a total of $64.4 billion, iSuppli forecasts.

Three games are initially available, Wipeout 3D, Pain and Super Stardust 3D, along with a demo of Evolution’s MotorStorm: Pacific Rift. The games will cost £23.99 in the UK.

Firmware update which will add stereoscopic 3D rendering support to the console to roll out on June 10.

In Japan at least, Andriasang reports, Wipeout HD, Pain andSuper Stardust HD will be updated on the same day, with Pain requiring a ¥300 charge to unlock a 3D mode. The news followsSony’s announcement last week that Killzone 3 will be playable in 3D.

Sony has invited members of the UK media to a “Sony 3D” briefing on the same day, presumably to usher in the update.

The Japan-based news site also said that Sony plans on updating PS3′s firmware to support 3D Blu-ray later this year.

Yummy! They had me at Wipeout HD… in 3D!

Additionally, Sony says that it plans on updating the PlayStation 3 firmware to support 3DBD video playback. This will be available by the end of the year.

From Andriasang.

The real value of the PS3 and its Blu-ray capability is now starting to show.