this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2025
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Perspective (discuss.tchncs.de)
submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

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[–] [email protected] 51 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Tilting your head shouldn't make a difference as 'modern' (as in the ones that cinemas started using fifteen years ago) 3D glasses use clockwise and anticlockwise circular polarisation filters, and obviously, turning something 90° doesn't change whether it's clockwise or anticlockwise. Other kinds of polarisation filters do care about being rotated, which is probably where the artist got the impression it applied to 3D glasses, but it would be dumb to try and use that kind as obviously, people tilt their heads.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Wouldn't it still look weird because the two images are offset in a different axis than your eyes?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

It can make it look a bit weird (and be one of the things that makes people nauseous), but most people's brains are good enough at figuring it out that it's not a major problem. It wouldn't make a difference to the situation in the comic, though, as in that frame, they're talking about making both lenses match to pick between two 2D movies, so there'd be no offset anyway.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Huh I guess I haven't been to a 3d movie in quite some time. I definitely remember had tilting used to work

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

3D IMAX was way later to using circular polarizers (if they ever switched). Were you only watching 3D in IMAX?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

Probably a mix. This was at Cineplex in Canada which also does the IMAX shows here. Maybe they were just behind the curve

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I don't know what modern means here, but the cinemas I go to still use the same glasses as from the beginning of 3D movies.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Anaglyph 3D (with the red/cyan, or lower-quality red/blue filters) has been around since the 1800s (3D films predate talkies by decades), but was much more of a gimmick and wasn't used for big-budget serious films as it ruined the colour quality, mainly being used for 1950s B movies. There were a bunch of other methods used between the 50s and 2010-ish like regular Polaroid filters (which did stop working when you tilted your head like in the comic and were a hassle for other reasons) and active shutter (which relied on expensive and heavy glasses with electronics in). The newer kind that relies on circular polarisation became available since the turn of the millennium, with Avatar in 2009 being the film that made most cinemas buy new projectors. Those glasses made 3D films viable as the standard for a few years, before people generally decided that most of the time, being 3D didn't add enough to the viewing experience to be worth paying extra for and studios decided it wasn't elevating their art enough to justify the extra production costs if people weren't going to pay a premium.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

When I said the beginning of 3D movies, I meant the Avatar Era. And the ones I usually see are normal polarised, not circular. And to me it's still a stupid gimmick thst adds nothing positive to the experience of watching a movie.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Unless your local cinema got a good deal on a projector from a 1980s theme park 3D movie, it's definitely using circularly polarised filters. If you've tried tests like putting the lenses from two pairs of the glasses or one pair of the glasses and one pair of regular polaroid sunglasses next to each other and rotating them, that'll still make them get brighter and dimmer like with linear polarised filters, as passing through the filter can change the polarisation to elliptical, and that means it'll be affected by rotation when it gets to the second filter.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

people generally decided that most of the time, being 3D didn’t add enough to the viewing experience to be worth paying extra

Because most of them were just 2D movies converted to 3D in post. Doing that tends to look like crap. The ones filmed for 3D, like Avatar, looked amazing, but studios didn't want to wait for the next wave of films and wanted 3D now with what they already had.