Posts by BenWilson
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That would be a Freudian twist, to put a valley on a mountain. Ambitious too.
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It's a case of stick to what you're good at it, i.e being bushy and beautiful.
That does sound like a recipe to just do nothing, which I don't think is especially cool, however apt to it that we are.
Just being bushy and beautiful has basically nothing to do with me, nor much of the NZ I spent 99% of my time in. I don't think that having a small piece of the place aspiring to emulate Hollywood is really that awful, although I'd personally just as soon have us aspiring to Silicon Valley, but that's just me being selfish.
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Here's a thought. The sign could say Wellington. Hollywood is, after all, the actual name of the actual place. The very nature of the sign is reference enough.
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Hero only made 26 million HKD (not sure what that was worth then, is 1 USD something like 7 HKD?) in the Chinese box offices, but it made 177 million USD worldwide, which is a pretty good total. Must've been a bit galling to come in behind the much inferior The Last Samurai . But blame the Japanese for having deep pockets, apparently they liked it, at least, accounting for more of the box office than the USA.
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Recordari, you've answered my question. If you could see a stereogram in 3D, you have binocular vision.
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But as it wasn't filmed in 3D it simply be a case of remastering 2D footage to whatever 3D frame they had in mind, enhancing the original illusion.
If only it was so easy to make 3D, just remaster the footage. Then we could watch Buster Keaton in 3D. But no, it's not that easy. Perhaps, maybe, just maybe, Gollum could be done in 3D, since he was a motion capture. But I don't think he was a 3D motion capture, so probably not, after all.
I've tried the head movement thing (like your son, I suspect effectively one-eyed people - even if it's one-eye-at-a-time- try about everything to get approximately normal vision)
Most likely you've been functioning for years off a vast range of visual cues about distance - lines, angles, comparative size of things, partial overlaps etc. And moving your head around. Anything to give a clue, help with the mental model of what you're seeing. And focal length of the eye is reasonably accurate at shorter ranges. But the focal length won't help with any 3D projection (yet, who knows what funky technology may one day come out), and the head moving won't work with the glasses style 3D, which carefully filters one image for each eye.
but never one of the gadgets you mention - any commercial name for 'em?
Well 3D TV has a number of such technologies, mostly called autostereoscopic. The cheap static pictures are called lenticular, I think, but that could be a subset of autostereoscopic. Some of the 3Ds use lenticular lenses to get effect.
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Islander, it was the Viewmaster that first helped me understand what binocular vision even was.
I have a 3D picture on my desk....cool idea, one of those plastic things with ribs, with the picture that moves as you turn it. Held the right way up, it looks perfectly 3D, without any need for special glasses, and as you turn it, it looks like you're moving around it. I gather that this is the basis of one of the technologies for 3D TV. Neat idea. It also might work for the one-eyed, a little bit. One of the ways one-eyed people can judge distance is to move their head from side to side. If I close one eye and move my head side to side with this picture, it is as though I'm moving around a 3D image....so there may be hope for you yet.
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Some computer games do not have the focal distance thing. Everything is in focus. It is possible to make a 3D film like that, especially a 100% rendered one like Avatar. But the choice to use focus (which, when rendered, is itself a visual effect) is most likely a conscious one by Cameron, so that he could draw your eye around the screen just the same as is currently done in 2D. I'm pretty sure I saw a few scenes where the focus was removed, particularly some of the high pace action scenes.
This sort of film craft is very new. They basically had to invent a lot of it, to establish the new norms. I've seen a few 3D films, but they've been of the documentary variety, whatever artfulness was in them was from careful selection of beautiful things to show, rather than trying to tell a story. The established tricks of action film don't necessarily work. Were there any jump-shots? Can't recall any, not really surprised, people would have just missed them. We're just not quick enough with our eyes yet. Which meant that 3D was a limitation in many ways. There weren't too many first person shots either, I suspect because they might have made people feel sick. That level of immersion might have been too much. Perhaps these will come in a director's cut, or re-render. Very few distortion effects were used, period, it would have been wasted, people would have just seen a blur. I saw no 'stuttering' images either, or anything with time dilation effects. It would have been too much. Spinning was usually done slowly. I don't recall any 'zooms' either, nor use of grainy filters, or Matrix-esque computer 'visualizations' All of these techniques are stock standard in action nowadays, particular in battle sequences.
LOTR would probably look awful in 3D, because they use 'forced perspective' a lot on the hobbits, usually in the talking scenes. In 3D it would just look like the room and furniture was a really odd shape and the actors the same size. Tricks like that aren't easy in 3D yet. In Avatar, they didn't need it.
I expect as our eyes get used to it more, adventurous directors will be able to flip us around a lot more, and we'll learn to like it. Or hate it. The one-eyed will miss out.
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A short comment apropos recordari's astigmatism remark: I now have one eye with perfect distance vision and the other with very limited sight (cataract.) 3D doesnt work for me, and couldnt have altered my perception of "Avatar."
If, however, you could see perfectly with the other eye, then it might have altered it. Did you go to the 2D version? There would have been no point in the 3D version, other than looking just a bit blurrier than a 2D projection.
Recordari, you do have binocular vision, though, right? Unlike my son, who can see perfectly out of both eyes, just not at the same time. He switches between. So he couldn't get anything out of the 3D at all, rather like Islander (if I understand her properly), if for different reasons.
But your eyes got tired? So did mine. 3D film is still a visual illusion. It doesn't actually look exactly like real 3D. The focal length of your eye lenses still has to remain fixed on the screen. So if something looks like it's hovering before your nose, your eye still has to remain fixed on something 50 metres away. This does cause the eyes/brain to get tired until you get used to it, because you have to learn to "see 3D". Normally our focal length tracks closer as our eyes converge. Not so during Avatar. The 3D effect is entirely achieved by the convergence of the eyes.
Also difficult to accept is the dissonance between seeing in 3D, but not being able to see everything with clarity. In this, it's like all film, the camera's focus changes. With 2D we're used to it, and tend to follow the focus. With 3D, we still haven't necessarily got used to this, and feel like we should be able to look around, but things are blurry. We're still not sure if it's blurry because of tired eyes, trouble with the glasses etc, so the brain has to work harder. If you are looking at something that is not in focus on the screen, but is still in 3D (because it is a 3D projection), then your brain will try to tell your eyes to find the focus. The eye will be unable to, and furthermore anything that was in focus will shift out, because you will not actually be focused on the screen any more. Then you can get double vision and really struggle to find the focus. It's hard work for the eyes/brain.
But note that looking at flat projections of 3D objects is also hard on the brain, we've just got used to it. Photographs look clear to us because we have learned to look at them. People who have never seen one before (or any other "realistic" pictures) can often not see things in them that are extremely apparent to us. This is because we have to suppress the urge to see in 3D, and yet mentally form a 3D model of what we are seeing.
So it's possible that the tired eyes thing will go away as we watch more and more 3D.
Also a bit straining is that you can't tilt your head from side to side. I can't see this limitation disappearing without some science I've not heard of.
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Shit, I am now thoroughly confused by this entire discussion. I... didn't call anyone 'defective'. Did I?
Did I? Did anyone? Is this a dead horse? 3 months ago, I would have said "Yes". Now, it seems there's just that little bit more life to be flogged out of it.
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