The Jurassic Park Lesson on Why 3D is Unpopular

Back when I started this blog, I was well aware that I was writing to a niche market of people who, like me, see 3D as a potential improvement to the film industry. I still stand by that. I want to see 3D flourish into the great cinematic experience it should be. That said, if 3D was the lump sum of its awesome potential, I wouldn't need this blog to defend it, and my recent voyage to the cinema to see Jurassic Park 3D led me to understand why 3D isn't appreciated.

Barring a few conversion errors (transparent objects and between trees being the largest offenders), the 3D conversion in this film was a fantastic technical achievement. When those conversion errors weren't present, I would not have been able to easily identify this as a non-native 3D movie, thanks to the care they obviously took to accurately map people and objects. Given the number of details they got right, I am permissive of the errors that persisted. Regarding the cinematic benefit, 3D didn't always help (some scenes were framed so that the 3D version drew your eye away from the action of the scene due to the convergence/focus technique I described in a previous post), but when it did help it felt like the movie's natural state was in 3D (in particular, I think of that vegetarian hacker kid dangling from the air vents above a hungry velociraptor). They made the best possible 3D conversion for this film, and the studio should be proud of what they created. It was extremely good, but they were contending against external elements outside studio control that fought my attempts to enjoy it.

The first was the critics. Now, admittedly, most critics gave Jurassic Park 3D favorable reviews, even for the 3D. But, as I've seen with critics before, nobody has ever talked qualitatively about why the 3D was good. And unfortunately, the first critic I found to actually give some sort of qualitative assessment claimed that, "like most 3D conversions, it looked like a cardboard cutout." (Forgive the lack of a reference; I don't want them to receive traffic, and therefore ad money for such a ludicrous statement.) So, we have an outright lie declaring the film poorly produced technically, or no information to go on at all about attending this movie. I imagine a number of people were filtered out of wanting to see the film at this stage.

The second problem was the theater itself. What hurt me especially was that I wanted to attend a premium showing of the film. Consequently, I purchased tickets for a showing labeled under Cinemark's XD branding (which is supposed to compete with IMAX as a premium screen size and projector quality). The theater I attended was instead using the XD branding for a film that was clearly being shown in a regular movie theater rather than an XD one. On top of that, I never recieved a pair of 3D glasses (fortunately I had snuck in my own pair of higher quality glasses). I wasn't charged the XD price for the showing, but I am still annoyed that I was unable to attend what I intended to when I arrived, and the staff provided me otherwise poor service.

Speaking of which, the third problem was also the theater's fault. Jurassic Park 3D makes heavy use of floating windows to keep the 2D film decisions of the movie from hurting you eyes in the 3D version. But there's a problem common enough that Disney created a tutorial video for theater employees specifically telling them not to do what they did in the theater I attended. Basically, in 2D theaters, employees will sometimes cut off the edges of the movie because it's difficult to set up the movie precisely and there's rarely critical information there in 2D movies. But floating windows exist entirely in the edges. Consequently, I had the worst of both worlds: frame violations and black bars on the edge of the screen.

Now, this isn't meant to be a post about how bad that theater is. Typically when I've attended this theater, my experience has been great (I would still recommend it to any of my friends as my preferred theater). But it highlights 3D film's biggest weakness: its complexity. There are so many layers to a successful 3D exhibition that if any portion of it is inadequate at all, 3D becomes a painful experience. Everything has to be just right, or audiences will find it unacceptable (especially since it's billed as a premium service), so there's no room for laziness or incompetence in the 3D business.

I think that may also help to explain why 3D TV is failing to gain traction as well. While it fixes the problems I had in the cinema by being completely in control of exhibition, there are few channels available to those interested in 3D (Comcast, for example, has a 3D demo channel and ESPN 3D). Those that do air commercials from whoever's brave enough to advertise on such a slim market. The people who advertise resort to the cheapest possible conversion for their commercials (I saw one where the actors in the ad looked like anorexic zombies because their necks had no depth whatsoever).

That said, this doesn't mean 3D is bad, or that it will ultimately fail. Jurassic Park 3D is doing very well at the box office, and 3D TV purchases are way up this year. This market will survive, but only if it insists on some quality control.

Could a simple protective film be the future of glasses-free 3D viewing?

I didn't come up with that title. I stole it from one of those ad-in-disguise news articles that's been going around Malaysian news sources. There's an example here, but I'll give you the gist of what they're saying, and then answer the question from the headline.

Developed in Singapore by Temasek Polytechnic (TP) and A*STAR's Institute of Materials Research and Engineering over the course of two years, the film, called EyeFly 3D and set to go on sale globally in May, contains 500,000 microscopic lenses that can render static and moving images in stereoscopic 3D, yet it is only 0.1mm thick, making it the same size and thickness as traditional screen protectors.
It won't take a user's existing 2D images and films and convert them magically in front of their eyes, but it can take any content shot in 3D and display it as such, without the need for 3D glasses.

They use a lot of numbers and buzzwords to make what EyeFly is doing sound impressive and science-y. And while what they're doing is cool, they are over-hyping their product just a tad by pretending it's a revolution. This is not "the future of glasses free 3D viewing," but a re-application of old technology we've seen in a number of other products (The Nintendo 3DS is the first to come to mind, but less famous examples include the HTC EVO 3D, the LG Optimus 3D, The Fujifilm W3 Finepix 3D Camera, or the sticker covers on the sleeve of 3D Blu-rays).

This technology is what's known as a parallax barrier, in which precisely cut slits in a screen (or ridges in the case of those 3D stickers that 3D Blu-rays use) are used to direct images individually to your eyes. In the case of EyeFly, they've created a film that you can put over your existing smartphone to allow this kind of image separation. They've also created software for the iPhone that will allow you to transform normal stereoscopic video into an interleaved video format that will allow video to play on your phone after you put this film on it (although they're planning an Android version for the Galaxy S2 as well).

It's a technology that works, and a good way to cheaply upgrade from a 2D to a 3D smartphone. It will present the same problems I've previously highlighted with autostereoscopic displays, including the narrow viewing angle, and halving your phone's resolution. Halving your phone's resolution could also affect the text displayed on it, by the way. I'd have to actually see the product in action to know by how much, but difficulty reading is something to look for in reviews and to take into consideration before buying.

But I digress. The conclusion here is that this isn't revolutionary technology. It's economy class technology that will get the job done if you're looking for a cheap 3D smartphone. It is something I'd look into myself (assuming their software ever supports Nexus line Android smartphones and tablets, or some 3rd party makes universal android software for them), but not something I'd recommend without first seeing it in action. EyeFly looks like an interesting product, but that company is really misinforming the public about why their product is so interesting. That makes me suspicious about their ethics as a company, so my advice is to wait for reviews to know if that product is worth buying. Hopefully they just hired a marketing department that doesn't know what they're marketing.