Filmmaker Says Human Brain Not Suited for 3D

[gigastar]

Fortunately i am one of the freaks of nature who can focus and converge eyesight independently, so if my brain fries by this time next year, ill write off 3D as a failure and force them to try again.

If youre interested in learning how to independently focus and converge eyesight lie youself down, focus on the cieling and dont move any part of you, keep poking every possible nerve your feeble brains can access until your sight suddenly blurs. Once you hit that nerve you need to keep hitting it until you know its there and you know how to reconverge both ways. Once you hit this stage you may lose the ability to do it unconciously (I did) so focusing on something will take additional effort. Other side effects unknown.

One great advantage I got out of it is the kind of stare thats so cold I feel it on my own eyes. Im surprised I dont have freeze vision yet.

 

[JediMB]

I haven't had any problems with eyestrain or headaches.

What does bother me, though, is subtitles. They're very distracting in 3D movies. I just end up focusing on them and miss out on the depth of the actual footage.

 

[chris89300]

I've never tried 3D yet (I live in France, therefore any technological advances happen about 70 years later, unfortunately, but from all I've read about the most widespread 3D technique, it doesn't put THAT much strain on the eyes/brain ... besides, unless we're obsessed by 3D, we won't be watching 3D material 24/7 ... In my educated opinion 2h of 3D + about 30 mins break is more than enough to counter the eye, even the brain strain it WOULD force us to endure, if his baseless theory is correct.

The thing is, the human brain is a beautiful and most efficient machine, I very much doubt we'll be able to push it to its limits with tech as primitive as 3D.


On a side-note, I would REALLY LOVE holograms ... real ones, not Japan's 1 FPM bullshit. BTW, I hope all the assholes that attended to that worthless "holographic" concert got AIDS somehow ...

 

[Shifty Tortoise]

I just avoid 3D movies altogether, normal ones are cheaper and i get get to laugh at the suckers who spent double on the 3D version. It's a win win

 

[Saucycarpdog]

I seem to remember that there IS a way to shoot films so that the ENTIRE screen is in focus. Not sure what it's called, but I do know they used it to shoot Citizen Kane. Strangle that they can't seem to adapt that for 3D. I know they don't use it on regular 2D films very often because they want to draw your attention to specific things on the screen.

I heard it was something called deep focus. I don't get the concept of it though.

 

[gyroscopeboy]

I seem to remember that there IS a way to shoot films so that the ENTIRE screen is in focus. Not sure what it's called, but I do know they used it to shoot Citizen Kane. Strangle that they can't seem to adapt that for 3D. I know they don't use it on regular 2D films very often because they want to draw your attention to specific things on the screen.

I heard it was something called deep focus. I don't get the concept of it though.

They use Hyperfocal Distance, much like a lot of landscape photographers do to maximise what is in focus in their images. It's different for every lens.

 

[Pilkingtube]

We should just skip right to that holographic images stuff. I want my holodeck damnit!

Look up vocaloid 3d concert...

We have the tech already...

That thing with the Japanese anime was just projection onto a screen, that is no holodeck!

 

[Electrogecko]

What you just described is not a malfunction of the 3d screen but the entire concept behind the technology. 3d displays DO allow you to focus on an image that can appear to be any distance from popping out of the screen to the infinite distance....perfectly too. The angle of your eyes when they view what they think is the same object is what your brain processes to determine what distance the object is from you and create the 3d effect. What happens though, (just like it does in the real world) is that anything that's not on the same plane becomes severely out of focus.

Exactly. You are either trying to focus off the viewplane, or adjusting your convergence expectations to something that does not correspond with the real, off-screen, world, which blurs either, contrary to what your autonomous systems would expect and note that it's the entire viewplane that blurs or sharpens, uniformly, regardless of the various apparent distances displayed.

EDIT: Different people are differently adept at relaxing their vision, i.e. suppressing the self-adjusting functions of their eyes and then "switching them back on".

Your argument hasn't changed and I am still in disagreement with you. With a 3d screen your eyes CAN focus on a point that's miles behind the screen. It doesn't matter whether the perceived distance is the same as that of the screen from your eyes. Your eyes, and thus your brain, can not tell the difference, which is why the screen appears to show a perfectly normal 3d image. What are your eyes and brain doing when viewing a stereoscopic display that they're not doing when simply looking out a window? The two are exactly the same internally. I know that the convergence point is false, but I don't think that changes a thing, and I think this article mislead many people.

Don't bother responding again....no offence. I just don't think I'm going to be persuaded/convinced by anything other than a powerpoint presentation with diagrams and such.

 

[ryo02]

Ive never looked at a modern 3d screen Ive simply no interest in it.
something I dont want making other things expensive thats all it is.

 

[BloodRed Pixel]

yeah this artificial 3D just sucks.

 

[RN7]

What he doesn't realize is that we already have holograms. It's just that those milllions upons millions yen are being spent to create...15 year old...multi-color hairstyled...japanese...robots.

 

[Somebloke]

Don't bother responding again....no offence. I just don't think I'm going to be persuaded/convinced by anything other than a powerpoint presentation with diagrams and such.

Likewise.
No offence on my part either, but you like to flaunt a claim of expertise, but provide no references or evidence to support either this, or your argument, so I'll respond anyway, not necessarily for your benefit.

Make this thought experiment:

You have a camera that is attrached to a speeding car. The car, which is the centre of attention, is at a fixed convergence point, which matches the screen, whilst the road ahead is blurred due to the focal range of the camera's optics, simulating the effect of the lenses in your eyes. This is an ideal case, where no strain should arise.

Now put the camera on a tripod on the road and have the car speed past and off towards the horizon. The car remains the centre of attention and therefore the focus puller keeps it crisp and sharp. Here some people's eyes will, depite the focus puller's best efforts, try to adjust focal depth, to compensate for the convergence changing over time, as the two images of the car comes together horizontally, pulling the view out of focus.
For the duration of the film, your mind needs to suspend this relevant-to-the-real-world reaction, selectively, for the part of the "world" shown on screen, but not the rest and afterwards readjust to "normal" operations.

I believe this is something that can be trained, by just watching stereoscopic displays a few times and I do not believe it can cause any permanent stress, the way you can, over time, become myopic from looking at things up close all the time.

*I* will be getting stereoscopic as soon as it becomes affordable. This is something I have been waiting for, for many years, but this does not mean I'll be pretending the shortcomings of the concept does not exist.

 

[hexFrank202]

"600 million years of evolution has never presented this problem before."

So? How about we give evolution a few more years and BAM, we'll be able to do it! The ability to look at two planes at once could prove to be quite useful, especially in the digital age, and the possible future of technological singularity. At very least; humans will have something else that it'll be better at than all the other species in the world.

Come on, it won't take too long! Just go into a 3-D movie theater, find anyone whose eyes are hurting and shoot them. Pretty soon we'll be able to enjoy this new technology properly.

 

[SL33TBL1ND]

Isn't this what we've all been saying for a while now?

 

[Electrogecko]

Likewise.
No offence on my part either, but you like to flaunt a claim of expertise, but provide no references or evidence to support either this, or your argument, so I'll respond anyway, not necessarily for your benefit.

Make this thought experiment:

You have a camera that is attrached to a speeding car. The car, which is the centre of attention, is at a fixed convergence point, which matches the screen, whilst the road ahead is blurred due to the focal range of the camera's optics, simulating the effect of the lenses in your eyes. This is an ideal case, where no strain should arise.

Now put the camera on a tripod on the road and have the car speed past and off towards the horizon. The car remains the centre of attention and therefore the focus puller keeps it crisp and sharp. Here some people's eyes will, depite the focus puller's best efforts, try to adjust focal depth, to compensate for the convergence changing over time, as the two images of the car comes together horizontally, pulling the view out of focus.
For the duration of the film, your mind needs to suspend this relevant-to-the-real-world reaction, selectively, for the part of the "world" shown on screen, but not the rest and afterwards readjust to "normal" operations.

I believe this is something that can be trained, by just watching stereoscopic displays a few times and I do not believe it can cause any permanent stress, the way you can, over time, become myopic from looking at things up close all the time.

*I* will be getting stereoscopic as soon as it becomes affordable. This is something I have been waiting for, for many years, but this does not mean I'll be pretending the shortcomings of the concept does not exist.

You lost me at "Here some people's eyes will, depite the focus puller's best efforts, try to adjust focal depth, to compensate for the convergence changing over time, as the two images of the car comes together horizontally, pulling the view out of focus."
First of all the focus puller would be the car in this example? Second, if the car is driving away from a couple of side-by-side lenses, wouldn't the two images of the car would move apart horizontally?

In a nutshell, I still don't understand how the viewing of either one of these scenes IRL would be any different from viewing them in stereoscopic 3d. Both adhere to the same rules of depth perception and focal points. One just does it in an artificial way.

 

[Flauros]

Were not supposed to be doing ALOT of what we do. Just add cognitive spatial aphasia to obesity, malnutrition, eye damage from old screens, car accidents, blah blah blah....

 

[Unrulyhandbag]

...It seems to me that these complaints can be applied to a theatre performance. Unless someone can explain how looking at a 3d display is any different than looking out a window for your eyes and brain, I'm all ears.

The actual display is still 2D and its distance from you is fixed. Due to the stereoscopic offsets, however, an object may appear at another distance to you and if your attention goes to that object, your eyes (lenses) will try to refocus to that distance, to a spot at which there is, of course, nothing but thin air.

Object moves, eye refocuses, the issue is that a film needs us to keep both eyes focused on the same point and and at the same distance all the time. That we can do, it takes only a small amount of training.

Know those magic eye things? same principle; instead of focusing on two crossed over points and not allowing your eye to refocus with the 3d effect you do the simpler task of focusing on the same point which avoids eyestrain once you've trained your eyes to the task.

The choice for 3D for holograms and stereoscopic is a none-issue, even the greatest hologram would be a confined space able to show only the objects within it. That's going to look weird without long distance backgrounds which are are going to have to be 2D, unless they have some stereoscopic effect.

We either train ourselves to use the technology at hand or we miss out on 3D monitors, which are damn useful to the CAD, graphic design and medical worlds just to name a few. They make very nice pictures, can aid our understanding (and action) of a scene in a film and and they add a lot to gaming when used properly.

 

[brumley53]

Has anyone seen the new TRON in 3D? cause I thought it was really good, I've never really had a problem with 3D though but it did annoy me that most things in 3D, including AVATAR would add too much depth, a small room would look like it was miles longer than it should've been and I think that may be what gives people headaches.