What went wrong with 3D?

What went wrong with 3D?

Global Hypercolour T-Shirts, HD-DVD and 3D are all things that are now gone from the face of the earth with few reminders that they ever even existed apart from our cherished memories of them.

Well, to be honest 3D hasn't quite gone the same way as the first two, but it is certainly a technology that now looks to be officially considered a failure. Why do we say that though? After all, there are plenty of cinemas showing movies in 3D, you can buy Blu-ray movies with three dimensions and TVs can pretty much all offer some support for the format.

All true, but recently Sky decided to shut its dedicated 3D channel, and that tells us a lot. But even if it hadn't done 3D would still be all but dead in its current form.

So what went wrong, and what can we learn?

Don't tell us what we want

If you want to be uncharitable, but pretty accurate, you could argue 3D was a way of boosting cinema profits, getting bums on seats and ultimately selling TVs and Blu-rays.

The big problem was, no one bothered to ask consumers if they wanted 3D.

Had they then people would have probably told them that, no, in fact, 3D sounded like an utter waste of time; it had never worked in the past and we were all happy with cinema being something we watched, rather than something we vaguely thought was sort of coming out of the screen.

And unlike most awesome technologies, seeing 3D didn't change people's minds either.

You'd go to the cinema, or put on a Blu-ray and after the film was finished you'd sigh and in most cases swear to never watch a movie in the format ever again. It was not a product that sold itself at all well. Especially not when Avatar, a movie which a film student would get a D- for, was held up as the crowning glory of the medium.

TV manufacturers screwed the pooch too. They went, largely, down the route of charging loads more for a 3D TV.

The reality was though that adding 3D to a TV was as cheap as chips.

You needed a panel that could run at double the framerate of cinema and TV. That equates to 60 frames per second. Most TVs were easily capable of that, and then all that was needed was a way to sync that to some glasses via Bluetooth or infrared.

To most of us, 3D just seemed like a way to charge more for TVs that cost the same as their non-3D brothers.

It's only now, with new technologies like LG's UHD OLED, that 3D in TVs is starting to actually look good. Too little, too late…

Movies in 3D are barely even 3D

The problem with 3D in films is that you're still looking at it on a flat screen of a certain size. When you're watching a 3D move the illusion of depth only works if things happen within that window. So as impressive as things flying out of the screen are, they eventually have no move scope within the frame, and that destroys the illusion.

Also, when it comes to destroying the illusion, bear in mind that in 3D when something comes toward you, your eyes attempt to focus on it. But because its distance to you hasn't changed, your eyes can't focus properly and the whole thing turns into a mess.

3D video usually ends up looking like two layers, which doesn't really impress all that much.

You'll usually find a foreground and background in 3D, which is fine but it doesn't really represent what we see in the real world.

Perhaps in the future there will be a way – through VR – to track your eyes so that the image can be dynamically refocused in front of you. So, while there will still be "layers" in a 3D movie, they could be dynamically shifted in and out of focus as you look around the frame. That would give you a truly immersive experience.

Although it might also make you vomit on yourself – only time will tell if your local cinemas are ready for that.

Is 3D totally dead?Is 3D totally dead?

Here's where things get both interesting and confusing. No, 3D is not dead, it's merely resting.

One of the things that will make 3D a little more attractive is, weirdly, VR. Because VR produces images for both your eyes separately, it's automatically able to do 3D well and with great ease. What that means is that games will be 3D, and you can watch movies in the format too, should you chose.

For gaming, this is going to be absolutely huge.

VR games on the Gear VR from Samsung are fantastic and demos for Oculus Rift and HTC Vive make it look utterly amazing too.

And let's be honest, we do all see in 3D so it's natural to want to experience games and other entertainment in the format.

VR gives a much more natural environment for that though. And while some of the same problems exist – like having to wear something over your face – it's a much better experience than a 3D TV could ever give. Plus, head tracking has the potential to give you an even more immersive 3D experience by actually producing real 3D rather than something that was just a series of rather obvious layers.

Will we see more 3D movies?

If you look back at the history of cinema you'll see that there have been 3D movies for almost as long as there have been movies.

So yes, it's almost guaranteed cinemas will carry on showing 3D movies. They've bought the equipment now, they can charge a little more and James Cameron isn't, sadly, doing to stop making Avatar movies any time soon.

And there are still people who steadfastly wont see films that aren't shown in 3D either.

And these days a lot of movies aren't shot with special 3D camera rigs, but the depth information is simply added digitally in post-production. This works well for films that are heavy on CGI, and as you might expect, CGI animation can be made into 3D even more simply.

So the 3D movies will continue to be made. Cinemas can show it, and you can watch it at home, so there may still be a reasonably small market for it for years to come.

But 4K will be the killer blow

It's reasonable to argue that 3D was an attempt to make TVs profitable again, but now the novelty and desire has worn off TV manufacturers are left with the same problem again – getting more than £1000 out of customers, rather than £350 for a bog-standard 1080p TV.

And 4K has learnt from all the mistakes that 3D made.

People seem to care about resolution, they remember the jump from SD to HD and think that HD to 4K will be the same. In truth, that's not the case but 4K does still offer an improvement.

There will be a new Blu-ray format this year, but it's also quite likely that Sky will invest the money saved on 3D into producing 4K sports at some point this year. Along with that Netflix and Amazon both stream 4K and so does YouTube, so there are more places to watch UHD content now – something that really choked 3D as it was mostly a disc-only format, with the odd TV channel or event.

Other technologies like HDR, which allows a TV to display more detail in light and dark areas of the picture, rather than have them wash out, or disappear into the gloom are already impressing this year, like Samsung's gorgeous UE65JS9500. We'll also get panel technologies like OLED and quantum dot TVs with much bolder colour, which will be a very visual improvement for most people.

So TV is about to have another sales boost, but 3D is long-forgotten.

At least until the next time it rolls around…

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