Last night, I saw Gravity in Imax 3D.
I've tried seeing 3D movies before, with no results, but I thought I would try again in light of my recent experiences with small amounts of 3D vision.
Before the movie started, there was a little intro for Imax 3D. You know, showing the logo, making a deafening noise, things like that. At the end of the intro, the camera zoomed into the Imax logo. Suddenly I felt my eyes start to cross, and I got the sensation that something was going to hit me in the face. I immediately tore the 3D glasses off my face in a panic. I can't even remember what I actually saw; I just remember the feeling.
After that, I thought, 'Wow! This is going to be an exciting movie!' But then... it really wasn't. The actual movie seemed kind of flat. And sometimes, with the white-suited astronauts on the black background of space, there was a lot of ghosting. C'mon Imax, can't you figure out how to show 3D without ghosting?
About halfway through the movie, I remember that I still had the blurry stick-on eye patches in my front pocket. So I stuck those to my glasses, to make the movie a bit softer. That seemed to help.
Sometimes, when the camera would show the inside of a space shuttle, it seemed like I was looking through a window into a real room. It looked clearer and more real. It only happened when the camera showed a small crowded room, like a space shuttle... I don't know why. Maybe it had something to do with the presence of lines of perspective and other monocular depth cues, which might have helped me add some depth. Just a theory.
And at one point, there was a tool floating around the inside of the space shuttle. It started floating towards that camera and, like the Imax logo, I thought it was going to hit me in the face. I gripped the arm rests and forced myself to watch it come at my face and I actually saw it coming out at me. Hurray!
So that's what happened at the 3D movies - flat the majority of the time, but there was a scary Imax logo, realistic/weird looking views into a space shuttle, and the floating tool coming out to hit me in the face.
Also, it was a good movie!
I am also stereoblind, which is how I found this blog, so my comment will just be conjecture. I believe many 3d movies these days are shying away from using too much of the 'pop out' effects (like the wrench and logo). It would make sense to me that for someone just starting gaining some stereopsis, the depth effects would be harder to appreciate.
ReplyDeleteI can't really afford the therapy, but from exercises I try to do on my own. I can get binocular vision when looking at something in the foreground, like placing my finger between my eyes and a dot and seeing 2 dots, but can never go binocular on the background ( eg one dot with appearance of flanking fingers). This may be unrelated as I so far haven't been stereoscopic, just binocular, but it would make sense to me if there was a relation.