Well, the title of this post very succinctly sums up my feelings on the whole thing, but I suppose I should elaborate. I will be talking about 3D in the context of both games and film/TV, to be something resembling fair.
This is the Virtual Boy. It sucks. It's also 3D. Coincidence?
Let's start with the obvious. 3D has been done before now, obviously. Take a look at the Virtual Boy, for example. Actually, don't. Really, really, don't. It's screen had an amazing two colours - Red and Black. And it was in 3D. You could play for about 10 minutes before it broke your eyes.
But even before that, 3D has been achieved. For example, watching sports in 3D has been done for years. Centuries even. The Ancient Greeks even had 3D sports. This was usually achieved by leaving the home, and actually attending the event. There you go - an amazing full 3D event.
Snarkiness aside, there is something to be said for the concept of 3D movies and gaming. I reckon it would be great to be able to experience a game in full 3D surrounding you. However, the problems with 3D as it is now are:
A) It doesn't work
I haven't seen many movies in 3D, to be completely honest. Hell, I haven't seen Avatar in 3D or even in glorious 2D. The movies I *have* seen in 3D are Alice in Wonderland (the Johnny Depp one), and Tron Legacy. If there was ever going to be a movie where 3D would be amazing, Tron was it. However, the only real 3D effects I saw in that movie was a slight amount of depth perception on the house, near the start of the film. In Alice in Wonderland, there was a butterfly in one scene, and I'm not even sure it was part of the movie - it may have been the title screen or something. Admittedly my memory is hazy. The fact that I cannot recall anything about the 3D of these 3D movies is a bad sign, is it not?
ThinkGeek yet again tempts me, with the solution to 3D... these glasses make the 3D into 2D - and the film actually watchable
B) The glasses suck
When I went to these 3D films, I had to wear 3D goggles, as they make you do all the time, obviously. The reason behind this is that (typically) there are two images being displayed, overlapped on each other. One is for your left eye, the other is for your right eye, but the images are slightly different. The lens on the glasses filter the images so your eye only sees the appropriate image, giving you this 3D effect. The one that doesn't work.
Am I the only one who has a problem with seemingly crossing your eyes for potentially hours on end? Am I the only one who thinks that this is a horrendous idea?
Anyway, this is why some people tend to get headaches and eye strains from this - your eyes feel like they are going funny because they ARE going funny. Intentionally. I don't know if there has been much research into this, but it sounds to me like a logical way to injure yourself.
On a related note, as a permanent glasses-wearer, wearing glasses over my glasses is impractical, and stupid.
C) It's a gimmick. An expensive gimmick
Nowadays, almost every big Hollywood film seems to be in 3D. A lot of them aren't designed initially for 3D, and just tack it on. This may be why my experiences mentioned under (A) were pathetic. It seems everyone is tacking pointless 3D onto their film in a bid to sell more movie tickets. At a higher price at that. Can't the filmmakers rely on good writing, and good acting to make money.
Well, it IS Hollywood we're talking about. I suppose they can't.
It's gimmickyness feels like the Nintendo Wii's motion controls to me - shoehorned into everything that is released to appeal to the idiots who go "ooh shiny" and then wonder why their heads hurt after watching the thing.
On a related note, I tried the Nintendo 3DS. It gave me a small headache, and made my eyes hurt a lot. Part of this is likely fatigue, I have been getting minor headaches a lot lately because I haven't been sleeping well. However, this was triggered almost instantly as I looked at the screen trying to play Super Street Fighter IV 3D Edition.
To me, the 3Dness of the game looked like two distinctly different images slightly on top of each other, which was very disconcerting, and definitely the course of my headache. Somehow, I still managed to beat the CPU, but by that point, my mind had been made up - I am NOT buying this machine. I don't care that it would be my first opportunity to play more than 30 minutes of Ocarina of Time - if I can't get use of the main feature of a device, then I will not purchase that device.
And I will avoid 3D TVs, movies and gaming machines as well. I like to be able to see what I've paid to see, thankyou very much.
No comments:
Post a Comment