Is 3D going to change fundamentally or do I have to fight my nausea?

[XiaoSu Han]

I got a little sick when I watched Avatar the other day. Lots of people get headaches.

Is this going to improve technically? I am reading stuff like "3D in your home soon" "new standards" and am afraid that I can't watch most of it because of motion sickness or the 3D stuff.

Is it going to improve or is only the next generation going to benefit from our evolution?

 

[jimhare]

I know what you mean. Simulators and 3D usually bother me.

But I have to say, Avatar in RealD-3D was the first time the image held together, was effective, and didn't make me uneasy for even a moment. After 160 minutes I was ready for more.

All my previous experiences with 3D have been how you describe. What theater did you see it in? My understanding is Avatar is being shown using a variety of 3D technologies, some fantastic, some in need of improvement...

 

[Michael Bravin]

I got a little sick when I watched Avatar the other day. Lots of people get headaches.

Is this going to improve technically? I am reading stuff like "3D in your home soon" "new standards" and am afraid that I can't watch most of it because of motion sickness or the 3D stuff.

Is it going to improve or is only the next generation going to benefit from our evolution?

Its not nausea until you puke, it's excitement!!

 

[GPSchnyder]

I think the new techniques like Real-D and the Dolby one are good and don'r cause this Problems any more.

Some Cinemas that use 3D longer than 2 or so years may have older stuff that isn't that good at all. i watched Avatar and had no Problem at all. And no one had. At least I didn't hear anyone say that after the movie. I watched the Flick in Real-D and it was a fantastic ride.

 

[Sanjin Jukic]

I got a little sick when I watched Avatar the other day. Lots of people get headaches.

Is this going to improve technically? I am reading stuff like "3D in your home soon" "new standards" and am afraid that I can't watch most of it because of motion sickness or the 3D stuff.

Is it going to improve or is only the next generation going to benefit from our evolution?

Walter Murch discusses future technology...Stereoscopic 3D movies...

"Stereoscopic 3D is all the rage now, but you may not know that Walter Murch also worked on one of the iconic 3D short films,
Captain Eo, starring Michael Jackson. Francis Ford Coppola directed Eo for the Disney theme parks in 1986. It’s too early to tell
whether the latest 3D trend will be sustained, but Murch offered his take. “3D certainly has excellent box office numbers right now,
but there is still a fundamental perceptual problem with it: Through millions of years of evolution, our brains have been wired so that
when we look at an object, the point where our eyes converge and where they focus is one and the same. But with 3D film we have to
converge our eyes at the point of the illusion (say five feet in front of us) and simultaneously focus at the plane of the screen
(perhaps sixty feet away). We can do this, obviously, but doing it continuously for two hours is one of the reasons why we get headaches watching 3D.
If we can somehow solve this problem and if filmmakers use 3D in interesting ways that advance the story – and not just as gimmicks – then
I think 3D has a very promising long-term future.”

LINK>>>

 

[Ketch Rossi]

Unfortunately 3D, even the most professionally executed like Avatar, not only depend on the known laws of Spatial 3D to be respected and the Convergence and Divergence as well as Interocular spatial distances to be put to proper use, even so respecting the director's wishes in achieving his/her desire effect, all can and it was achieved incredibly well in Avatar.

Unfortunately NO two tethers will Project the movie the same and if the proper glasses were not given that to can cause serious issues, but even when the same polarized glasses are given in al the cinemas, there is still the HUGE issues of Projector calibration, as well as the proper Screen, and unfortunately I must say that many cinema are not capable of providing with al this elements, yet they take your money and present you with a lesser of an experience that you should be given, and I'm absolutely certain that if James was to be in one of those cinema would have it take it down in an instant.

 

[Eric Lange]

Following on from what Sanjin posted. There are new technologies to take care of a lot of the problems you describe. Apart from basic alignment and display issues, I see the main cause of headaches and eye strain comes from using and displaying a too larger range of parallax. The basic problem (which we believe we have solved) is that if you use a small range of displayed parallaxes (for a particular scene), then it is comfortable on the eyes and sustains longer periods of viewing. However this narrow range of “safe” parallax makes everything fairly flat and un-engaging; which puts into question why use safe stereo if it looks boring? On the other hand, you can use greater ranges of displayed parallax, which provides a much richer 3d experience and is more engaging, but after about twenty minutes your brain has a hard time with this unnatural level and degree of high volume “rich” parallax, coupled with basic convergence vs accommodation problems, and after an hour or so of that you want to go home with your eye balls in a glass, and an ice pack on your head. Using conventional technologies, for the most part you can have safe and boring or fun and painful. The middle ground is hard to achieve purely by carefully composed shots.

The technologies we/I developed largely solve this problem but are mainly applicable to real time environments but can certainly serve the needs of stereo cinematic applications. Safe viewing parallaxes come from narrow base separations (inter-ocular distances), but this tends to flatten the fine grained and gritty three dimensional texture. Wide inter ocular can extract fine “gritty” 3d texture, but the range of parallax for the rest of the scene is way too large and is painful to view. I devised new methods that essentially resample all of the parallaxes in a completely clean fashion so that fine 3D texture is preserved, but the MACROSCOPIC Parallaxes in a scene can be completely adjusted (real time) to safe comfortable viewing limits (without flattening fine 3d rich texture). You therefore get very rich 3d texture and safe comfortable viewing. The added benefit of the techniques we use enable one to build 3d models that are 400 times more efficient at representing complex 3d surfaces than conventional explicit modeling. So this would be very good for stereo interactive video games that have startling realism. Recently we have received a notice of allowance from the US patent office, and the patent will be officially granted in January. The same methodologies I believe can be worked into the post workflow of stereo cinematic applications (we have developed some of this basic capability already). To the user, what this means if a movie has been re-sampled using our techniques or a real time video game, it grants the ability for the first time to independently control macro AND micro (surface) parallax of the whole scene, to comfortable limits of the whole scene without compressing the fine and rich 3d textures (ie micro parallax). Therefore the problem of having rich engaging stereo that is comfortable on the eye is largely solved. Now that our patents are being granted we can get out and about a bit more. The software also allows for the very clean and practical extraction of new types of 3d models that also have many applications in VFX and real time media/government applications. The basic results don’t look like computery over processed noisy garbage, but instaed look indistinguishable from a flawlessly executed live action stereogram.

To answer your question, yes rich stereo that does not hurt your eyes in your living room and at the cinema is certainly possible. I am very sensitive and intolerant to stereo induced headaches, and I have to say the data sets we have created are a real Joy to view and work with, (especially as you know that you don’t have to expect psycho-visual torture just for your 3d entertainment!).

Cheers,

Eric

 

[istvanttt]

Eric, sounds interesting, I always thought that there is a way to get there, but..

Anyway, my question, in your system you still have the Liliput effect with wider IOD?
Have a nice X-Mass
istvan

 

[Stephen Matthews]

I hope they get it to a point where the differences in the theaters no longer matters, because regardless of if it was shown properly or not that is the movie you see. I feel these theaters should not show it, cause now I am wondering if i should put down another 20 dollars to go see it and risk paying for yet another massive migraine (and I got a migraine not a headache big difference). I love the idea of seeing a few event 3d movies every now and then but not if I have to go to a specific theater that I have researched before hand, movies should be an easy relaxed event not a research project.

mah sorry for the rant I'm just upset I did not get the same experience as everyone else visually. I hope it was the theater I saw it in but considering I have a predisposition to getting very bad migraines it could be that. In that case I hope that it doesn't mean that I will never be able to experience a 3d movie properly.

Either way I still got to experience some of the visuals as they were supposed to be (I hope) and some made me tear up. Not even story points just the environments did it to me, weird i know but I'm unusually emotional like that.

Hope you guys are right, and next time i go i will wait until I can go to the theater of my choice (this time all tickets were sold out and I went to a theater I'm not familiar with).

ps. I saw it in real3d Imax, sat in the middle (could have been part of the problem) and I have no eye problems.

 

[PaulClements]

The muscles of your eyes are not use to converging two images on a 2D plain, that's why you get a headache. Children can adapt much quicker than adults to using the muscles slightly differently.

There are two solutions, in the short term sit farther back. You get a slightly different experience, things don't jump quite so much. But you still get a bit of the experience none-the-less and are less likely to get a headache.

The second long term solution is to simply watch more and more 3D. Once the muscles and brain adapt to seeing 3D you can then watch for longer and more extreme forms of 3D. If you are finishing a movie in 3D this is something you should be aware of, having sat looking at 3D for a long time you can watch to your hearts content but someone else might get a blinding headache a couple of minutes in because they're not used to it.

Paul

 

[Dan Hudgins]

Monitoring

Monitoring

I got a little sick when I watched Avatar the other day. Lots of people get headaches.

I made another post on the monitoring problem, you cannot use a small monitor to adjust the stereo because when you watch it on a big screen without re-formating the stereo overlap your eyes will diverge.

The viewers eyes should NEVER diverge, so its best to align INF at the screen plane so it is viewable on any size screen, otherwise you need to make a stereo version formated with overlap adjusted for each screen size so that the INF points are 65mm apart on ALL screen sizes.

 

[Eric Lange]

Eric, sounds interesting, I always thought that there is a way to get there, but..

Anyway, my question, in your system you still have the Liliput effect with wider IOD?
Have a nice X-Mass
istvan

To answer, Istvantt; Thanks for the very good question.

No you don’t get the “Liliput” effect unless you really want it. For each stereogram, the image contents are essentially rebuilt in true 3d, the stereo imagery as stereo textures are embedded into three dimensional substrates, that contain the high frequency 3d texture. The 3d scene is re-rendered using stereo virtual cameras so that you can set the focal length and inter ocular distance to anything you want. The fine 3d texture still persists from the original large IOD, but does not have the detrimental effect of creating a miniaturizing effect. The Macro parallax is controlled with the virtual cameras, and the Micro “surface” parallax of the3d objects comes from the wide IOD. That way you get the best of both words, optimized MACRO parallax of the scene with rich 3d surface texture. No card-boarding and no Liliput! Because we embed and resample the stereogram in true three dimensions, the eye locks onto the stereo textures and not the 3d substrates. The 3d substrates are essentially invisible, and hence the final product is indistinguishable from a very well composed and optimized natural stereogram.

Cheers,

Eric

 

[istvanttt]

Sounds excellent, will you plan to show it in San Jose in January?
Ciao, Istvan

 

[Eric Lange]

Not this January, but next. If I don’t officially present a paper by then I should officially fire myself! The problem is that you have to submit a paper before June, and we didn’t know that the US patent examiners were finally going to “get it” and grant us our 40 or so claims, [very frustrating and dicey business but worth it in the end].

On the hardware front, we are somewhat dependant to a certain degree on external or 3rd party technologies, and it’s good that things have stabilized (somewhat), and even the announcement of delays with then RED EPIC/Scarlet and in particular FF35 have certainly given us some breathing room so we can concentrate on solid current technologies that are not so much in flux [the nice vapor-ware from Jim/Red has been very useful and exciting to plot future applications, but the announcements of the various delays have been doubly useful to help bring into better focus a more straight ahead development program]. Having the patent in the bag does mean that in 2010 we can start to show our wares and try to figure out the most appropriate points and levels for technology transfer. We are still engineering and designing new hardware, for advanced 3d capture in general, but trying to develop an ‘affordable’ high precision entry point into the market has up until recently proved elusive. The future of all these types of technologies is really at the feet of higher resolution capture systems, and I look forward to applying our techniques to EPIC resolution footage and larger formats still.

Cheers,

Eric