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.