An interesting letter sent in to Roger Ebert by Walter Murch, famous academy award winning film editor, discusses how 3D will never work. Not because of price or a lack of content, but rather due to the evolution of the human vision process and the requirement of decoupling the human eye’s ability to Focus from its ability to Converge.
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.
I’ve got to admit, it’s a convincing argument. Could such a problem be this generation’s Motion Sickness or DIMS?
via Why 3D doesn’t work and never will. Case closed. – Roger Ebert’s Journal.
It’s a problem, but is solvable. It does however require that you use glasses that can force your eyes to focus appropriately, essentially putting interchangable lenses in front of your eyes that can force them to refocus, and have those lenses adapt at a high rate of speed to the content’s depth encoding, the viewer’s gaze, and their distance to the screen.
Or we could just get people accustomed to stereoscopic viewing. Put glasses on a kid 4 hours a day from age 3 on and they might not have any issue with this after a year or two.
Or we just say screw it and live with it. We’ve lived with 24fps stuttering pictures for decades. We know we need to do better, 120fps would be ideal, but we don’t, and chose to simply live with it. I suspect enough viewers will chose to live with the issues related to current 3D tech just as well.