Ik was vast van plan een nieuwe televisie te kopen, en dus stonden we in de Media Markt geduldig te wachten tot er een verkoper vrij was.

Een plasma, dat brandt in. Een LED, dat is zo’n beetje dof. Dus dan maar LCD.

En geen 3D, nee meneer. Het kost mij te veel, en ik ben er niet voor. En kijk, wat lees ik vandaag bij Roger Ebert?

The biggest problem with 3D, though, is the “convergence/focus” issue. A couple of the other issues — darkness and “smallness” — are at least theoretically solvable. But the deeper problem is that the audience must focus their eyes at the plane of the screen — say it is 80 feet away. This is constant no matter what.

But their eyes must converge at perhaps 10 feet away, then 60 feet, then 120 feet, and so on, depending on what the illusion is. So 3D films require us to focus at one distance and converge at another. And 600 million years of evolution has never presented this problem before. All living things with eyes have always focussed and converged at the same point.

If we look at the salt shaker on the table, close to us, we focus at six feet and our eyeballs converge (tilt in) at six feet. Imagine the base of a triangle between your eyes and the apex of the triangle resting on the thing you are looking at. But then look out the window and you focus at sixty feet and converge also at sixty feet. That imaginary triangle has now “opened up” so that your lines of sight are almost — almost — parallel to each other.

We can do this. 3D films would not work if we couldn’t. But it is like tapping your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time, difficult. So the “CPU” of our perceptual brain has to work extra hard, which is why after 20 minutes or so many people get headaches. They are doing something that 600 million years of evolution never prepared them for. This is a deep problem, which no amount of technical tweaking can fix. Nothing will fix it short of producing true “holographic” images.

Consequently, the editing of 3D films cannot be as rapid as for 2D films, because of this shifting of convergence: it takes a number of milliseconds for the brain/eye to “get” what the space of each shot is and adjust.

And lastly, the question of immersion. 3D films remind the audience that they are in a certain “perspective” relationship to the image. It is almost a Brechtian trick. Whereas if the film story has really gripped an audience they are “in” the picture in a kind of dreamlike “spaceless” space. So a good story will give you more dimensionality than you can ever cope with.

So: dark, small, stroby, headache inducing, alienating. And expensive. The question is: how long will it take people to realize and get fed up?

Ha!

En verder ben ik heel content van de televisie, vooral nu dat mijn Telenetdoos zijn menu in 1080-dinges toont. Ik had daar HDMI-kabels voor nodig, blijkbaar: SCART trok het niet.

En wat een grap, trouwens: in de Fnac waren er kabels tussen 20 en 300 euro: de duurste zouden zogezegd nóg beter signaal geven. Terwijl begot al die kabels precies hetzelfde signaal geven.

Trr.