This is just Ebert being an idiot and saying "This is my opinion, stated as fact, case closed. I won't enter into any discussion because I might be wrong", just like he said when he declared video games weren't art. It is /profoundly/ unscientific to dismiss something as unfactual simply because you don't like it.
Back in the day, my honours degree was specifically involved in investigating ocular vergence (research jargon as 'angle between the eyes' as opposed to the /action/ of converging), comparing between a collimated image (= light coming to the eye in 'parallel' - from a military helicoptor pilot's HUD) and a real image (= light coming in 'non-parallel') displayed at 3m. At that distance there is already not much difference between focusing or vergence at 3m and at infinity (ie collimated), though discrepancies slightly increase as you move towards the periphery of your vision, though this may have been an artifact of the presentation of the HUD.
I am not an expert in 3D and don't proclaim it to be 'there yet'. I do think that 3D is doable if the director stops the temptation of the 'power' closeup to showoff the 3D. So yeah, I think within constraints, 3D is doable. All film has constraints though, and those constraints are gradually eroded over time - such as night-time filming. Fifty years ago we would have heard Ebert proclaiming that it's impossible to film in natural light at night because film needs a certain amount of light, case closed, yet we've seen some amazing cameras arrive recently that can film at night using natural light.
EDIT: Another example constraint is limiting yourself to a 'viewing box' - you can't turn your head for a full view of the scene in a movie. You're limited to a particular forced view. Despite this rather incredibly limiting constraint, film has managed to do some pretty amazing stuff.
The part about focus of the eye is much more difficult to overcome. I think it has to do with resolution. And maybe a movie with a resolution of let's say 16.000 x 9.000 will give a better result because your eye can focus on details just like in real life.
But constraints of human beings don't change much. If our brains are not wired to really get the current 3D format, then I think that is a pretty good indictment of the technology. The post isn't saying 3D movies won't exist someday, it is saying the current 3D can't work well because of a limitation in the human mind.
But more importantly, the 600 million years of evolution argument doesn't hold the water he is putting in it. 600 million years of evolution did not prepare humans for traveling at 60 mph (much less controlling two tons of steel and insuring the safety of their children, while doing so), nor did it prepare humans for sitting in front of a bright light pecking at keyboards for hours and hours on end.
Focusing on one point while converging on another may require practice, but so does operating an RC car. But the fact that a broad swath of the population can readily do it the very first time, speaks against it.
Essentially, the case against 3d movies is an appeal to authority, and the article is really a rejection of the art form (3d is the rap music which is replacing their beloved rock and roll). That's not to say that there isn't a lot of schlock 3d - who really expected Green Hornet to be great cinema? - only that there is nothing inherently wrong with the medium.
That last bit could be used to support Murch's argument, if the articles I've seen on HN about ergonomic chairs and sitting versus standing are any indication.
This argument is missing the point. True, evolution didn't prepare us to drive cars, however it did prepare us to spend long periods of time focusing on objects at fixed distances and then changing our focus on the ~hundreds of milliseconds timescale. It also evolved us to allow independent movement of limbs during this process, essentially what driving a car is. This same argument could be applied to typing at a computer (without the need to change focus very quickly).
I think the point is that cinema in 3D forces us to change the location of our focus very rapidly (much faster than hundreds of milliseconds) for long periods of time, something that we are not equipped to do. For a physical activity like sitting our muscles are malleable enough to adjust to a sedate lifestyle, but to increase the speed and duration of rapid eye focusing would most likely require rewiring the brain. Perhaps if we were raised in this pseudo-3D realm our brain could adjust, but adults brains aren't wired to change like our muscles are.
Like any new tech, makers want to convince us this tech is the way to go. So study more, and give us the old school alternatives.
I saw Tron in 3D and suffered very mild side effects -- facial tension and a headache that went away after a few glasses of wine. The 3D effects weren't enough to make even those mild side effects worth it. I'm not even sure the 3D effects were a net plus for the experience without considering the side effects. Add a 40% premium on the ticket price, and it was a great deal for the theater and a lousy deal for me.
Until the technology changes fundamentally, I'm starting to think 3D movies are like heroin: we'll see a periodic resurgence and decline as the lessons fade away with one generation and are relearned by the next.
Where I watched Green Hornet (very funny movie if you don't expect to see a Coen brothers film, I think) the glasses were cheap plastic and you could take them home. I actually have two sets, maybe I'll give it a try :D
I'm sure the same was said about television, or travelling more than 30 miles per hour.
IOW, 3D movies induce eyesore and headaches, and there are plenty of people who experience that, myself included. could that hurt developing eyesight? no idea, but i can imagine why it could.
Altering and improving human beings is not undoable, it's simply a hard engineering problem. The technological improvement of human eyes started out with glasses, then contact lenses, then laser operations and eye surgery. There's no reason to believe we won't eventually overcome the problems stated in the article by clever engineering of the eyes and brain.
[1]As Bellaire pointed out below, the quote is from Arthur C. Clarke and not Douglas Adams.
3d movies, where we're all sat down in a fixed chair makes absolutely no sense. It's a gimmick that adds nothing - apart from headaches, crappy dark image and occasional crude "THIS IS 3D" in your face 'effects'. Sitting in a chair looking at a screen we already see 3D. We have all the cues necessary for our brains to reconstruct the scene.
Didn't work in the 50s, didn't work in the 80s, didn't work in 2010s. I guess every generation has some people who think it's a great idea to try it again.
I agree that a lot of bad 3D movies are put out there now, and I think the current hype will fade. But I have no doubt that the technology has advanced far enough that 3D is here to stay this time.
Hah! You wish. For example, Avatar made more than $2,000,000,000. That's $2 billion. And a huge part of the Avatar revenue comes from its 3D sales. Maybe it didn't work for you, but it sure worked for most people who went to see it.
FWIW, I saw it in 2D first, loved it, then later saw it in 3D and hated every minute watching it. It was dark and gave me a HUGE headache.
I also think it wasn't a great movie itself. It was a really safe storyline to appeal to a broad audience.
If it was 2D it would have likely sold the same number of tickets, just at a lower per-ticket price. Consider that it's DVD and Blu-Ray sales are commensurate with its box-office gross, with no 3D on offer.
You are underestimating the marketing value of the 3D effects. Of course the DVD sales will be great, because it has been on everyones radar for the last year+. 3D effects were a big part of that.
People saw AVATAR because hundreds of millions were spent on marketing, it had James Cameron's name attached, and it was well liked by popular critics and audiences. 3D was a footnote compared to that attention.
3D effects do no marketing favors for middling or outright-poor movies. The only thing they consistently do, is increase average ticket prices.
A friend sees the movie and says 'you HAVE to see this in 3D' and it becomes less about the plot, and more about the effects driving them to purchase a ticket.
You can't show the 3D in marketing, but you can (and they did) highlight the concept of it. It's like all those ads on TV about fancy TV screens with superior image quality -- they obviously don't show you the screen itself.
I saw both versions.
I don't get hte "3d headache" - but I definitely enjoyed the 2d version more. THere was more detail to focus on, and in tha tmovie, detail was everything. With the 3d version, I found myself trying to look at things in the foreground/background, and I just couldn't - not becuuse of any defect in my ability to manipulate my eyes, but because (I think...) they actually used differnet depth of field settings when rendering the 2 versions.. there were things in the 3d version you literally COULDNT focus on - they wanted your eyes on the action only. That buged me.
- I remember playing 3d Quake (the original) on my crappy home monitor, with LCD shutter glasses - and it was AWESOME FUN. SCARY.
So I think all the points in the article are valid, 3d is hard, for more reasons than joe average might know, I certainly learned some stuff - but it's definitely a aprt of the future, if only because our current equipment makes it technically easy to play back.
In a universe where Avatar 3D never existed, would the 2D version alone have sold as much? Remember, they would have also been able to deliver the movie earlier (I don't know how much, but making a 3D movie can't be free - at least not yet).
I'm reasonably certain that there are only a very small number of people who saw Avatar for the sole reason of it being 3D (in other words, if the 2D version was the only option, they would have skipped it).
Avatar did exactly the opposite of what intended to do and that is, it turned me off of 3D movies not on to them. Sure, it made the money it did, but at least for me, it didn't do anything to advance the technology nor promote it.
Go to a real IMAX theater and watch a real IMAX movie. They tend to be science documentaries, like Hubble 3D. Compared to that, Avatar just seemed fuzzy and out of focus to me.
A good friend can't enjoy 3D movies because for that reason.
About the "small" thing, I sat at the 4th row (?) and the image was fine.
Why not respond to those comments in child comments rather than in the parent? Surely that makes the most sense? It's very difficult to read a discussion where I have to read responses to comments I haven't read yet.
Given the choice between a discussion where some bits have been clarified in the light of later comments, and a discussion where some bits are needlessly confusing or wrong, I choose the former.
(I might take a different view if there had been lots of replies, which might have been invalidated as as result of the edit. But there weren't; just those two.)
I'm not sure how it would work, but the idea is to change the dioptry to the inverse of the distance of what's supposedly on the screen, so that our eyes need to focus at the same distance as the converging, effectively nullifying the inverse focus.
It's theoretically possible to produce some kind of hologram-like 3D that would side-step this problem.
(Arthur C) Clarke's First Law: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; when he states that something is impossible, he is probably wrong."
... has turned out to be correct often enough that I wouldn't want to place large bets on this.
(Digression: there's an obvious difficulty in assessing Clarke's First Law. When someone says something is impossible and is wrong, we can tell because, lo, someone else does it. But when someone says something is impossible and is right, we'll never really know for sure; the most we can say is that no one has done it yet. So: time travel? teleportation? faster than light travel? Plenty of eminent (and in some cases elderly) scientists have said, and doubtless will continue to say, that these things are impossible; for all we know they really are; but even if they are we'll never know for sure that Clarke's First Law is wrong for them.)
[EDITED in response to two comments: If the claim is "3D done just like it is now will never work" then I agree that CFL isn't very relevant. If it's "3D movies will never work", which is what I think "3D doesn't work and never will" ought to mean, then I think CFL applies. So maybe I'm really only criticizing Ebert and not Murch, who does embed into his comments the sentence 'Nothing will fix it short of producing true "holographic" images.'. I do wonder whether the quotes around "holographic" are trying to define it to mean "anything that fixes this problem" rather than strictly "something close to full-wavefront reconstruction using coherent light", in which case I guess he's right by definition and therefore vacuously. I would certainly not want to bet that actual literal holograms are the only way to solve the problem.]