I have yet to go to a 3D movie where I felt 3D really added to the experience. Avatar came close, and there were times when it was really cool, but there were also times when I turned my head or something didn't line up right and 3D took me out of the movie. Maybe a part of that is that right now the tech is immature, but I know that every time I've paid for 3D it's felt like a ripoff.
Ebert's point on focus really hits home for me. When you are watching a movie in 3D it feels like I should be able to focus my eyes anywhere I like, instead of accepting the focus the director has chosen in traditional movies. When I want to look at something in the background in a 3D movie, I expect to be able to focus on it. So either all 3D movies need to be filmed with really high depth of field, or 3D will always feel broken.
After finally seeing Avatar in 2D I'm convinced 3D was the only thing it had going for it. As I lulled through the movie there were times when I thought "Yeah, this scene would look cooler in pseudo-3D." I don't think it did a very good job of backwards-compatibility.
How to Train Your Dragon, though, was still quite enjoyable in 2D and I hear it was well done in 3D without going overboard.
I'm really curious how people reacted when sound was introduced...then color.
Nowadays everyone seems to be a critic and anything you give them they see a drawback to it and sometimes this behavior feels just too forced.
It is turning into: back in the days thing...
When actors were actors not animated characters etc. Remember back in the days the frame-rate was given by the projector fellow's hand steadiness and now we can control it. It has to start from somewhere.
As for me, Sony did some cool engineering to make Avatar possible and Cameron financed this awesome project. For me that is a winner. I enjoyed the 3D experience a lot.
I am old enough to remember when our households transitioned from a B&W TV to a colour TV and I absolutely guarantee you that that the reaction was one of unalloyed joy. No "bah-it-looked-better-before" in sight.
The difference is that in B&W you have no idea if the grass is a lush green or a parched brown, whereas in real life you make that determination in an instant.. The problem with 3D is, as Roger Ebert points out, that your brain already derived the 3D based on a 2D image. So the improvement is incremental, if that.
The real issue is whether 3D has a real potential in gaming, where gameplay is frequently first-person, as opposed to movie, where the experience is almost always third-person.
Or, to put it another way, if you can't turn the camera around, you don't need a 3-D environment.
Speaking as a game dev, the current 3D still isn't good enough for games, IMHO. As you said, it's incremental.
It is the case that game design sacrificed precision control to get the 3D look+feel when it was first introduced: for example, 3D platforming essentially has not progressed beyond Mario 64, and that game is still somewhat uncomfortable to "pick up and play" despite all its refinements; the extra dimension just makes everything far more complex. Adding the glasses helps regain some of the depth cues that make complex movement difficult, but then we're dumping on even more equipment, and gaming is already more complex than it needs to be for most audiences. A full solution would need to be convenient and unobtrusive.
Yes, 2D jump-and-runs tend to work better than 3D ones. At least gameplay wise--you can have a 3D look, but still confine your gameplay to 2D (or 2+1/2D, if you have layers or so). However I feel that first person shooters really benefit from 3D.
(And I admit that controlling a first person shooter in 3D with a mouse and a keyboard is more complex than most people are comfortable with. It's a skill that I needed to learn, too.
On the other, a certain level of experience and skill is also necessary to enjoy games like soccer or chess.)
Even infinite depth of field wouldn't completely solve the problem. The point is, your eyes have to physically focus on the far away screen the entire time, or the whole movie becomes blurry (obviously). When you're looking at a "near" object, there's always a mismatch between its apparent distance and the focus point of your eyes. And as you pointed out, you can't turn your head.
However, given these limitations, I've found 3D movies to be a great experience. In the case of Avatar in particular, an important point of the movie was how the protagonist becomes part of the alien world, and I felt that the 3D environment really helped the audience to get the same feeling. YMMV of course.
What's really a rip-off is all those movies now that were converted to 3D in post production. It's a bit like manually coloring a black-and-white photo before color film was available -- it may look kind of okay if you don't look too closely, but it's not the real thing. The flat faces in particular make people look like cardboard cutouts.
The low framerate (24fps) became very noticeable for foreground objects for me, I think because their apparent velocity caused insufficient overlap between successive images. But I haven't noticed this in conventional movies - was it due to 3D, or was the shot chosen to take advantage of 3D when it would normally be avoided?
My favourite 3D sequence in Avatar was when the heroine dropped-in on her dragon, falling away from us. Very cool and effective. I think a skateboarding documentary would be awesome in 3D (or any activity that is intensely 3D from the POV of the performer).
Ebert's point on focus really hits home for me. When you are watching a movie in 3D it feels like I should be able to focus my eyes anywhere I like, instead of accepting the focus the director has chosen in traditional movies. When I want to look at something in the background in a 3D movie, I expect to be able to focus on it. So either all 3D movies need to be filmed with really high depth of field, or 3D will always feel broken.
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