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SvennoJ said:
raygun said:
For those of you saying it's just a fad, you probably haven't been properly introduced. That's the problem. When I have someone over to check out 3d on my 50" pani, I slide the loveseat up close to the tv, and put on my Imax Under the Sea 3d blu-ray- blows them away every time. For me it's emersion that's important, you have to have it in your face, like the Oculus Rift (which I will be buying). 3D is how we see, you don't walk around with one eye closed, do you? It's natural, 2d is unnatural. I tell people to close one eye and look around the room, then open both eyes.

The current implementation of stereoscopic 3D is anything but natural. It asks your brain to ignore convergence and focal length cues of your eyes to determine distance. It will keep looking fake as long as you have to focus on 1 arbitrary plane and depth of field is decided for you. In real life I can focus at will on my laptop or what's behind it which completely changes what I see. Try to do that in a stereoscopic scene and your brain starts hurting.
Another important 3D clue is also ignored, parallax. Moving your head does not change the scene.

And sure it's a cool trick the first couple of times you see it. The 48fps IMAX dome presentation of swimming among coral reefs was pretty amazing in Futuroscope, yet a 20 minute presentation is good enough for me. A 2hr movie, exhausting.

And then there's the resolution drop, loss of color, annoying glasses or having to keep your head in 1 place for glassless 3D. Plus as you said yourself, you need a big field of view. Watching a 40" 3D tv from the couch is pretty pointless. No wonder it's not catching on.


The occulus rift hopefully solves the parallax problem, although the prototype only has rotational head tracking for now, not positional. Still not being able to adjust focus to near and far objects will remain a problem.

Yup.  Stereoscopic is not 3D.  Real 3D does not have a constant focal plane, etc., etc...