In honor of Meta's latest announcement, a thread on 175 years of 3D failure.
Let's first go all the way back to 1851 with the Brewster Stereoscope. No less a person than Queen Victoria was impressed, kicking off a fad that quickly sold over 250,000 units. Turns out it was not the future of photography.
1/
My point here isn't "3D bad". It's that for 175 years or more, people have been thinking "2D success + stereoscopic 3D technology = the future".
It's not a dumb hypothesis, really. People do process (a relatively close portion of) the world with binocular vision. Seems possibly important. 12/
My objection is that otherwise smart people, over and over and over again, make big investments in that hypothesis without ever understanding why it has failed so many times before. Facebook's VR losses alone are above $75 billion dollars.
Stereoscopic 3D is a cool novelty, but at this point I'd be amazed if anything serious ever comes out of it. And if it does, it will be because somebody really looked at the failures and pursues products people actually care about. Because so far, every time, people get bored and quietly go back to the thing that was already working for them. 13/
Here we move from history to speculation, but I think the real reason this doesn't matter is that humans are extremely good at reconstructing mental 3D from visual 2D.
It doesn't appear to be well studied, but human binocular vision mainly works well up close, and peters out around 50 feet.
But anybody can look out a window and have a decent 3D model in their heads extending out hundreds, even thousands of feet. 14/
My grandfather was blind in one eye from 12, but you never would have known it; he just lived his life. My understanding was that it was more a field-of-view problem for him than anything involving depth perception.
You can try it now yourself. Close one eye and go get a snack or a book from the shelf. How much does binocular vision matter at 1 foot, 10 feet, 30 feet? /15
@williampietri one i think should come back is lenticular postcards. they can't be that expensive to make nowadays.
my parents had this one when i was growing up:
For sale is this Continental (6 x 4 in) size lenticular postcard. Pictures shown below are of the actual postcard that is for sale. Any defects not readily visible in these scans will be listed after this sentence.S ...
@williampietri I think every company wants their technology to become "the next iPhone" and aren't happy with a fun thing that people use ~2% of the time.
It's annoying because I found some pretty good uses of 3D screens for visualising scientific data and also showing it to the public.
@williampietri Wasted? I guess in the big picture, yes, but it kept my bills paid for a year or so.
https://petapixel.com/2018/09/28/red-and-facebook-unveil-manifold-a-3d-and-360-vr-camera/
@williampietri wasted money is not an indicator of usefulness. Maybe the market is way WAY smaller than the largest companies on Earth dreamed it to be yet that means nothing on how productive or fun the tool itself is.
What is wrong are the relentless promises of "changing everything" or "shaping the future of thought" or implying it's for everyone. It's not. Maybe it's "just" for some architects in only part of their workflow, maybe it's "just" for some students only when they play with a simplistic chemistry model, maybe it's "just" for an artist sculpting something that is dynamic at a medium scale, etc, etc.
Maybe it is useless for 99% of people during 99% of the time... and yet still absolutely amazing for the others sometimes.
That's absolutely terrible for those humongous business who only aim at 1B+ users/customers ... and that's OK.
@utopiah As the thread indicates in a few places, I think 3D has some fine novelty uses, and other people have chimed in to point out niche practical uses. And that's great.
But those could all have been achieved without the enormous waste, by these or other means. If "somehow for the greater good" justified the investment, it wouldn't be waste.
@jrt Oh, for sure. Last month I was at the Musee Mechanique and really enjoyed using the coin-op stereoscopes. As novelties they're great. And the technology is always interesting.
But I think you're spot on about industrial incentives being at the heart of a lot of the waste.
@williampietri some of the 3D films I've seen has been a cinematic experience unlike anything else.
James Cameron's Avatar (the first two)
I know a lot of people dislike them for various reasons, but they are different. And i think that's also part of the problem; they went to great lengths to make an enjoyable experience that has that depth, and that was part of the production cost, and they didn't try to circumvent that.
For many other films it's something that's slapped on after
@holdenweb Well put!
And honestly, as a startup person, I'm ok with speculation. But what I want is intelligent speculation. Why waste billions to learn lessons you could have had with a little study? Or even worse, to yet again not learn those lessons!
@williampietri A few comments. First, 3D research left a trace very easy to follow in... patents. The classes are G03B35/00 to G03B35/26. This is the international classification: https://www.wipo.int/classifications/ipc/en/ITsupport/Version20170101/transformations/ipc/20170101/en/htm/G03B.htm
If you search in these classes, you will indeed find out that 3D is in fashion every 20-30 years and then quickly fades away. 1/n
I love 3D toys. I for one do not want to pour cold water on exuberance for them.
* 3D movie hype was directly informed by the TV manufacturing industry searching for growth after the move to hi def flat screens from CRTs plateaued
* ViewMaster fairy tales were magic when I was small
* IMAX 3D Jurassic Park was magic when I was big
* Nintendo 3DS was distinguishable from magic but pretty fun
* PSVR 3D Blu Ray was appropriate technology that we shouldn't leave by the wayside
* 3D audio augmented reality is an underdeveloped branch on the tech tree
* Open Source investment archiving and displaying all of the above needs support
How about we focus on the present, urgent problem of tech industries that get overwhelmed by hype capital? The metaverse is not the fault of 3D enthusiasm. Blame for that lies with sector monopoly - Facebook was too big to grow and they needed something, anything, to meme into a hype cycle.
@williampietri I think your thread successfully makes the case for stereoscopic 3D as a rule-of-thumb indicator of investor hubris, but that latecomer status bolsters my point that Facebook was motivated by a search for its next hype cycle rather than a technological fascination.
Note that Facebook also had earlier been hyping small screen video, to the detriment of many investors in that content.
Compare and contrast with 70mm film. Ben Hur wasn't just ambitious because it was shot with fancy lenses. But because it was ambitious it used them and so was marketed as a point of differentiation. So I think stereoscopic 3D is more of an expression of hubris rather than a cause, which yields novel cultural artifacts along the journey to niche status and so I'm not mad at that.
@octarine_wiggle I don't think Facebook was cynically looking for the next hype cycle. I think Zuckerberg drank the kool-aid, jumping into a hype cycle that was already in progress. But I don't think 3D is innocent here. 3D provides a very powerful novelty effect, leading a lot of people (investors, but also customers) to say, "This will change everything!"
They are wrong every time, but I have not seen a cognitive trap that's worked this many times or over such a long historical period to draw massive investment. The closest I could come is perpetual motion, which has regular eruptions, but as a society we've developed immunity to it. One could possibly argue for the Ponzi scheme, but I'd argue that's too broad to qualify, as each Ponzi scheme is about some specific business idea.
@williampietri just gonna rudely chime in as someone who until recently had no binocular vision (and still has very little) and state that yeah, in my experience lack of it MOSTLY doesnât affect daily life: essentially itâs like watching TV, as you say, depth can be inferred from the 2D information youâre presented.
HOWEVER: the world is a hell of a lot more visually interesting and easy to navigate with it. And now I can catch things when theyâre thrown at me.
@williampietri I have severe amblyopia (or lazy eye), and because vision in one eye is so much worse than the other, my brain simply switches off the bad eye in favour of my good eye. I was what is called âfunctionally blindâ in my left eye, rather than physically blind.
Turns out VR headsets force my brain to use the eye it usually ignores. The first time I put one on was the first time I ever saw in 3D. I cried. Got one for myself. Started using it pretty frequently⌠and found that my brain has started using my left eye a little even when Iâm not wearing the headset. My left eyeâs vision has even improved a bit because my brain isnât so violently opposed to using it any more! My optometrist is very excited. I now measure as having the lowest possible level of depth perception, but I DO have it.
This actually happens with a number of people with amblyopia to the point therapeutic treatments are in development using VR headsets, or were last time I checked.
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