Thursday 7 January 2010

2D is a special effect, 3D is not

Many people are talking about stereoscopic 3D technology now, thanks to Avatar The Movie, created by a bunch of professional CG artists, hardware and software developers. I want to add my 3 cents into it.
As a little kid I loved making 3D shapes (vehicles, cones, spheres, etc..) from cardboard. Imitating the real thing you may say. Recently, I had finally a chance to experience CAVE environment, it was quite new experience, even that I was already using stereoscopic setup for many years, after that, suddenly, the childish dreams returned!
I imagined myself holding my cardboard 3D car again, but in a more flexible environment. Virtual or not, it was real!
Some people would probably like to draw a car on a paper instead of making inacurate reality imitation. They usually have a very good talent to catch the very essence of reality and show it in a different form using their own stylization and augmentation, i.e. by leaving uninteresting details behind, enchancing key features, suggesting new, interesting point of view that we didn't think of. This techniques I consider as a stylization effect. You may increase contrast of your photo to make it more dramatic. Finally, you may use greyscale or even black and white stylization and concentrate on a message. Yes, it's a fact, greyscale/b&w movies are still in production. But nowadays it is not a consequence of immature technology, it is a special effect, a feature!
The very same analogy applies to 3D movies. As our parents were used to watch movies in greyscale (or some pathetic color hacks), we are used to watch movies in full-color, but still enjoy artistic sepia or b&w in some cases. You may not realize it now, but 2D is just a stylization as well. Do you know "pin hole" camera? It allows to overcome natural depth of field problems, sometimes photo makers are using something completely opposite - they try to maximize depth of field effect (making uninteresting things completely blurred). Our eyes suffer for similar problem - we cannot see sharp picture on every distance all at once. What is worse, the eye convergence doesn't help much here either, basically we see in a good quality only the object in focus. So 2D can be a reality augmentation effect - we can "cast" objects at various distances onto one plane and "see more at once". It is not exactly "more", because we are losing depth information, but it is a different point of view, just a stylization effect, one of many! (and the palette of such effects in 3D will even increase)
As a conclusion my prediction about 3D is like this: sooner or later (after technology will be more mature, no glasses, no headaches, etc..), most TV sets will be 3D, but some people will watch 2D movies still on them - as an underground/cool artistic stylization.

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