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Except that Clarke was referring to technology problems. I agree that with enough time, will, research, money etc many technical problems can be solved that wer

Except that Clarke was referring to technology problems. I agree that with enough time, will, research, money etc many technical problems can be solved that were thought impossible. But constraints of human beings don't change much. If our brains are not wired to really get the current 3D format, then I think that is a pretty good indictment of the technology. The post isn't saying 3D movies won't exist someday, it is saying the current 3D can't work well because of a limitation in the human mind.

brudgers 16y ago
It's not just the viewers mind, it's the film editor's as well. Murch says, "Consequently, the editing of 3D films cannot be as rapid as for 2D films, because of this shifting of convergence." OK, so 3d films have to be edited differently - since when have constraints been an issue in art? But more importantly, the 600 million years of evolution argument doesn't hold the water he is putting in it. 600 million years of evolution did not prepare humans for traveling at 60 mph (much less controlling two tons of steel and insuring the safety of their children, while doing so), nor did it prepare humans for sitting in front of a bright light pecking at keyboards for hours and hours on end. Focusing on one point while converging on another may require practice, but so does operating an RC car. But the fact that a broad swath of the population can readily do it the very first time, speaks against it. Essentially, the case against 3d movies is an appeal to authority, and the article is really a rejection of the art form (3d is the rap music which is replacing their beloved rock and roll). That's not to say that there isn't a lot of schlock 3d - who really expected Green Hornet to be great cinema? - only that there is nothing inherently wrong with the medium.
- GrandMasterBirt 16y ago
  Except there are studies coming out about the harm to developing eyes and such. The point is that we're not meant for 3D. 3D though is a great way theaters try to "add value" to movies forcing us to pay more. Tangled was playing ONLY in 3D in theaters around me xept for like 1 showing. Guess which is the only showing I could take my daughter to. She would throw the glasses off in 15 minutes due to headache an thats the end of the movie for her. Was that worth an extra 10 bucks a ticket? Like any new tech, makers want to convince us this tech is the way to go. So study more, and give us the old school alternatives.
  - rmc 16y ago
    Except there are studies coming out about the harm to developing eyes and such. I'm sure the same was said about television, or travelling more than 30 miles per hour.
    - baq 16y ago
      neither tv nor quick travel require eyes to focus on one point and converge on a completely different one. IOW, 3D movies induce eyesore and headaches, and there are plenty of people who experience that, myself included. could that hurt developing eyesight? no idea, but i can imagine why it could.
  - brudgers 16y ago
    I would be more concerned about the long term effects of the social coding portrayed in Tangled (e.g. verbal interactions, body image and gender stereotypes) than theoretical physiological effects.
    - possibilistic 16y ago
      Please elaborate. I'm not very informed about this kind of issue. Can you suggest any reading I could do?
      - brudgers 16y ago
        The seminal feminist work in the US is probably Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique.
    - defen 16y ago
      Telling other people how to parent is the #1 source of neverending flamewars on the internet.
  - simcop2387 16y ago
    This makes me wonder why someone doesn't put out a set of glasses with just clockwise (or counterclockwise, shouldn't matter) polarized filters in them so that both eyes see the same image and you don't get the headache. While it would suck to pay extra and not get it; it would help those that can't get it anyway.
- isleyaardvark 16y ago
  > 600 million years of evolution did not prepare humans for traveling at 60 mph (much less controlling two tons of steel and insuring the safety of their children, while doing so), nor did it prepare humans for sitting in front of a bright light pecking at keyboards for hours and hours on end. That last bit could be used to support Murch's argument, if the articles I've seen on HN about ergonomic chairs and sitting versus standing are any indication.
  - brudgers 16y ago
    The point is that we easily can sit in chairs staring at bright lights for hours on end. In so far as Murch's argument goes, arguing that we shouldn't for health reasons throws the baby out with the bathwater. Getting people to sit for hours staring at bright lights is his business and life's work.
    - foljs 16y ago
      You DO understand that a constraint can differ from another contraint, right?
  - l3amm 16y ago
    "> 600 million years of evolution did not prepare humans for traveling at 60 mph (much less controlling two tons of steel and insuring the safety of their children, while doing so), nor did it prepare humans for sitting in front of a bright light pecking at keyboards for hours and hours on end." This argument is missing the point. True, evolution didn't prepare us to drive cars, however it did prepare us to spend long periods of time focusing on objects at fixed distances and then changing our focus on the ~hundreds of milliseconds timescale. It also evolved us to allow independent movement of limbs during this process, essentially what driving a car is. This same argument could be applied to typing at a computer (without the need to change focus very quickly). I think the point is that cinema in 3D forces us to change the location of our focus very rapidly (much faster than hundreds of milliseconds) for long periods of time, something that we are not equipped to do. For a physical activity like sitting our muscles are malleable enough to adjust to a sedate lifestyle, but to increase the speed and duration of rapid eye focusing would most likely require rewiring the brain. Perhaps if we were raised in this pseudo-3D realm our brain could adjust, but adults brains aren't wired to change like our muscles are.
- foljs 16y ago
  >600 million years of evolution did not prepare humans for traveling at 60 mph (much less controlling two tons of steel and insuring the safety of their children, while doing so), This is irrelevant. It didn't provide any limitation on them doing so either, whereas in the 3D case, it did. > nor did it prepare humans for sitting in front of a bright light pecking at keyboards for hours and hours on end. Hence obesity, bone problems, cardiac problems et al. Are you seriously putting this argument forward? Every doctor in the country warns AGAINST "sitting in front of a bright light pecking at keyboards for hours and hours on end" for health reasons.
- dkarl 16y ago
  Tracking relative motion at 60 mph isn't really an exotic skill. A good Little League pitcher can throw a baseball 60 mph, and dodging rocks thrown by children seems like a low bar for survival. I imagine spears can travel that fast. The tip of a club could reach that speed, and arrows travel much faster. A cheetah can travel faster than 60 mph, and while cheetahs are a special case, there are many animals that can run faster than 40 mph, and it isn't necessarily fundamentally different for faculties that evolved for 45 mph to work at 60 mph. As for reaction times, the quickness required to dodge a punch, or the hooves of an elk kicking while it is being taken down, is more than adequate to drive at 60 mph. Even so, we find it unsafe to drive 60 mph except in an environment that has been engineered to be especially undemanding on our reaction times.
mixmax 16y ago
Human beings are technology too, albeit very complicated technology. Another quote from Douglas Adams[1] sums up humans as machines quite well: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" Altering and improving human beings is not undoable, it's simply a hard engineering problem. The technological improvement of human eyes started out with glasses, then contact lenses, then laser operations and eye surgery. There's no reason to believe we won't eventually overcome the problems stated in the article by clever engineering of the eyes and brain. [1]As Bellaire pointed out below, the quote is from Arthur C. Clarke and not Douglas Adams.
- bellaire 16y ago
  Did you mean Clarke again, and not Douglas Adams? You've quoted Clarke's third law.
  - mixmax 16y ago
    Ah, sorry about that and thanks for the correction.

brudgers 16y ago

It's not just the viewers mind, it's the film editor's as well. Murch says, "Consequently, the editing of 3D films cannot be as rapid as for 2D films, because of this shifting of convergence." OK, so 3d films have to be edited differently - since when have constraints been an issue in art? But more importantly, the 600 million years of evolution argument doesn't hold the water he is putting in it. 600 million years of evolution did not prepare humans for traveling at 60 mph (much less controlling two tons of steel and insuring the safety of their children, while doing so), nor did it prepare humans for sitting in front of a bright light pecking at keyboards for hours and hours on end. Focusing on one point while converging on another may require practice, but so does operating an RC car. But the fact that a broad swath of the population can readily do it the very first time, speaks against it. Essentially, the case against 3d movies is an appeal to authority, and the article is really a rejection of the art form (3d is the rap music which is replacing their beloved rock and roll). That's not to say that there isn't a lot of schlock 3d - who really expected Green Hornet to be great cinema? - only that there is nothing inherently wrong with the medium.

GrandMasterBirt 16y ago
Except there are studies coming out about the harm to developing eyes and such. The point is that we're not meant for 3D. 3D though is a great way theaters try to "add value" to movies forcing us to pay more. Tangled was playing ONLY in 3D in theaters around me xept for like 1 showing. Guess which is the only showing I could take my daughter to. She would throw the glasses off in 15 minutes due to headache an thats the end of the movie for her. Was that worth an extra 10 bucks a ticket? Like any new tech, makers want to convince us this tech is the way to go. So study more, and give us the old school alternatives.
- rmc 16y ago
  Except there are studies coming out about the harm to developing eyes and such. I'm sure the same was said about television, or travelling more than 30 miles per hour.
  - baq 16y ago
    neither tv nor quick travel require eyes to focus on one point and converge on a completely different one. IOW, 3D movies induce eyesore and headaches, and there are plenty of people who experience that, myself included. could that hurt developing eyesight? no idea, but i can imagine why it could.
- brudgers 16y ago
  I would be more concerned about the long term effects of the social coding portrayed in Tangled (e.g. verbal interactions, body image and gender stereotypes) than theoretical physiological effects.
  - possibilistic 16y ago
    Please elaborate. I'm not very informed about this kind of issue. Can you suggest any reading I could do?
    - brudgers 16y ago
      The seminal feminist work in the US is probably Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique.
  - defen 16y ago
    Telling other people how to parent is the #1 source of neverending flamewars on the internet.
- simcop2387 16y ago
  This makes me wonder why someone doesn't put out a set of glasses with just clockwise (or counterclockwise, shouldn't matter) polarized filters in them so that both eyes see the same image and you don't get the headache. While it would suck to pay extra and not get it; it would help those that can't get it anyway.
isleyaardvark 16y ago
> 600 million years of evolution did not prepare humans for traveling at 60 mph (much less controlling two tons of steel and insuring the safety of their children, while doing so), nor did it prepare humans for sitting in front of a bright light pecking at keyboards for hours and hours on end. That last bit could be used to support Murch's argument, if the articles I've seen on HN about ergonomic chairs and sitting versus standing are any indication.
- brudgers 16y ago
  The point is that we easily can sit in chairs staring at bright lights for hours on end. In so far as Murch's argument goes, arguing that we shouldn't for health reasons throws the baby out with the bathwater. Getting people to sit for hours staring at bright lights is his business and life's work.
  - foljs 16y ago
    You DO understand that a constraint can differ from another contraint, right?
- l3amm 16y ago
  "> 600 million years of evolution did not prepare humans for traveling at 60 mph (much less controlling two tons of steel and insuring the safety of their children, while doing so), nor did it prepare humans for sitting in front of a bright light pecking at keyboards for hours and hours on end." This argument is missing the point. True, evolution didn't prepare us to drive cars, however it did prepare us to spend long periods of time focusing on objects at fixed distances and then changing our focus on the ~hundreds of milliseconds timescale. It also evolved us to allow independent movement of limbs during this process, essentially what driving a car is. This same argument could be applied to typing at a computer (without the need to change focus very quickly). I think the point is that cinema in 3D forces us to change the location of our focus very rapidly (much faster than hundreds of milliseconds) for long periods of time, something that we are not equipped to do. For a physical activity like sitting our muscles are malleable enough to adjust to a sedate lifestyle, but to increase the speed and duration of rapid eye focusing would most likely require rewiring the brain. Perhaps if we were raised in this pseudo-3D realm our brain could adjust, but adults brains aren't wired to change like our muscles are.
foljs 16y ago
>600 million years of evolution did not prepare humans for traveling at 60 mph (much less controlling two tons of steel and insuring the safety of their children, while doing so), This is irrelevant. It didn't provide any limitation on them doing so either, whereas in the 3D case, it did. > nor did it prepare humans for sitting in front of a bright light pecking at keyboards for hours and hours on end. Hence obesity, bone problems, cardiac problems et al. Are you seriously putting this argument forward? Every doctor in the country warns AGAINST "sitting in front of a bright light pecking at keyboards for hours and hours on end" for health reasons.
dkarl 16y ago
Tracking relative motion at 60 mph isn't really an exotic skill. A good Little League pitcher can throw a baseball 60 mph, and dodging rocks thrown by children seems like a low bar for survival. I imagine spears can travel that fast. The tip of a club could reach that speed, and arrows travel much faster. A cheetah can travel faster than 60 mph, and while cheetahs are a special case, there are many animals that can run faster than 40 mph, and it isn't necessarily fundamentally different for faculties that evolved for 45 mph to work at 60 mph. As for reaction times, the quickness required to dodge a punch, or the hooves of an elk kicking while it is being taken down, is more than adequate to drive at 60 mph. Even so, we find it unsafe to drive 60 mph except in an environment that has been engineered to be especially undemanding on our reaction times.

mixmax 16y ago

Human beings are technology too, albeit very complicated technology. Another quote from Douglas Adams[1] sums up humans as machines quite well: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" Altering and improving human beings is not undoable, it's simply a hard engineering problem. The technological improvement of human eyes started out with glasses, then contact lenses, then laser operations and eye surgery. There's no reason to believe we won't eventually overcome the problems stated in the article by clever engineering of the eyes and brain. [1]As Bellaire pointed out below, the quote is from Arthur C. Clarke and not Douglas Adams.

bellaire 16y ago
Did you mean Clarke again, and not Douglas Adams? You've quoted Clarke's third law.
- mixmax 16y ago
  Ah, sorry about that and thanks for the correction.