Animesh Kumar {itsAnimesh}

2010 has been mostly about 3D technology and televisions which support it… All the major flat panel manufacturers showed off HDTV’s capable of displaying content in 3D… And then who can forget the runaway success of James Cameron’s 3D film Avatar, that has brought the third dimension back into the limelight… With so much buzz around 3D we tend to wonder whether its finally ready to spread across the world… My view about this is : Don’t believe this hype… There are couple of reasons why 3D has no future whatsoever…

1) Cost factor
The reintroduction of 3D into mainstream movies has seen a moderate degree of success over the past few years… Theaters have been able to charge more for tickets to 3D screenings, which has helped them in offsetting the exorbitant cost of upgrading their projection hardware(Yaa its a pain you know where for people like us )… But 3D still accounts for a mere fraction of overall ticket sales… This is because even with higher ticket prices, exhibitors cannot afford to make all of their screens 3D-ready… The cost of upgrading is also a problem in the home theater market, where HDTV’s have finally made their way into a majority of homes… The vast majority of these households have only recently bought in… Is it really reasonable to expect people who just shelled out serious money for their new flat screens to go out and buy another $3K TV??? The value-add, especially considering the endemic lack of 3D content, is just not enough to justify the purchase… Even if the consumer in question did have the money, they would be wiser to spend it on lets say upgrading their sound system, before going to 3D…

2) Content factor
There is an effort going on to lure people back into theaters… Unfortunately, it’s not as simple to produce a 3D live action film as it is a 3D animation… To achieve 3D animation, one instructs a computer to render a second channel of video slightly offset from the first… This is not significantly more difficult than creating an ordinary 2D CG animation… For live action films, however, 3D requires special cameras that are heavy and inconvenient to use… The practical upshot of this is that most of the 3D films being produced today are animated… This, of course, has implications for watching 3D films both in the theater and at home… If 3D continues to fail in winning over live action filmmakers, there simply won’t be much to look at… And while the studios have promised a handful of (mostly animated) 3D Blu-ray releases for this year, there’s just isn’t enough content available now to make it a must-have home theater technology…

3) Glasses
Over the years 3D technology has com a long way… But one thing that has not changed is the need for glasses… Reliance on them to send offset images to the brain is still a mainstay of any 3D viewing experience… This is the same case with 3D HDTV’s, which are shipped with battery-powered 3D glasses… This is an annoyance at the theater, but can you imagine having to put on a pair of glasses to watch TV in your living room??? And what do you do if you wear reading glasses??? The glasses make a hard sell even harder…

The push for 3D comes from a confluence of the old desire to create a more immersive cinema experience and the contemporary need to get people excited about going to the movies again… Unfortunately, the current 3D technology fails to deliver on the former and so it is destined to fail at the latter… It totally lacks what current viewers need it terms of viewing experience…