Thoughts on 3-D

I am pretty excited for all of the recent focus on 3-D entertainment. I think it's because it is bringing us closer to having the Holodeck, of Star Trek: The Next Generation fame. The Holodeck is a computer created world, where the computer can freely manipulate our perception of our enviornment, allowing us to be anywhere imaginable. Kind of like in the movie The Matrix, but where the computer is serving the human instead of vice-versa, and there are no technological appendages or prosthetics. I think it really could go either way.

When we talk about 3-D, a lot of people say what makes it different from 2-D media, is that it adds depth perception. Some people say this is wrong, but I say it is partially right. 3-D movies and games, as we have today, add additional information we use in our depth perception.

So what is depth perception? Let's break it down for a second. Perception is the how of how we understand our universe. Depth is a term we can use when there are three perpendicular axises in space. I totally pulled that out of my butt, but you know what I'm talking about. We really can only say we exist because we can say we exist. It can be argued that we are just little sparks of energy bouncing around in the fat of our skulls. So, it's pretty amazing that we can know details about objects in our universe, like judging how near or far they are away from our fat little skulls. So depth perception is the how of how we understand how near or far something is from ourselves.

The new information that is added to 3D movies and such is a phenomena called stereopsis. However, we should know that there are many things we subconsciously consider when using our eyes to judge how far away something is from us. This becomes apparent when we watch a regular old fashioned TV show or look at a photograph. The view depicted doesn't come across as some freakishly trippy scene where reality has poured away, and people and the objects around them exist only in the paint on a wall. We can successfully comprehend the three dimensional space depicted by the view from the camera.

Back to real life. Apparently there are like six or seven things we subconsciously consider in our depth perception. For example, we are used to people being about 5 or 6 feet tall, so if we see one who is half an inch tall, we probably wouldn't wish them a pleasant day- not because we have anything against little people, but because we safely assume they are outside the hearing range of our modest greeting. A lot of our depth perception has to do with that kind of thing- how big or small stuff is or becomes relative to other stuff. There are other things. Like when stuff blocks other stuff, you can assume which is closer to you. Also how high vertically something is in your view often dictates how far away it seems. This is logical, because if something is high in your view, it is more likely to be farther away from the patch of ground at your feet when looking out toward the horizon and what-not.

I still don't totally understand it, but what 3-D movies and stuff add is an element called stereopsis. It has to do with this magical third eye your brain creates in the center of your skull. This eye can always see things which one eye can see, but the other cannot. Most people have two eyeballs. You may have seen how a fly's vision is depicted where because they have a million eyes, they see a million of everything they look at. I doubt this is the case, because we have two eyes, and we don't see two of everything we stare at. That would be ridiculous. Your brain obviously combines the info from both eyes. That's where the part comes in that I don't totally get, but it seems that your new third eye gets info from cells in the visual cortex that can "see" the disparity between the views from your physical eyes. That's when the magic happens, and I still don't get it, but our brain assigns points of relative distance in the peripheral around the objects on which we focus both of our eyes. Somebody let me know if you know more about how this happens. Then again, not understanding it is part of what makes it cool, so maybe don't ruin it for me.

What really put me over the top with my obsession with 3-D lately is a product from a company called iZ3D (www.iz3d.com). Why did nobody tell me about this? They have a free Windows driver you can download that adds stereopsis to basically anything rendered by your PC's existing 3D hardware and software. You can just use those paper red/cyan glasses most people have around from a novelty book or something. I had some "proprietary" cyan/red glasses (I put them on backwards). I also ordered some nice plastic ones off Amazon for like five dollars. iZ3D apparently has a 22" monitor and glasses you can get for under $400 if you want to do away with the red/blue thing. I would get it, but my computer doesn't have the right video outs. The driver allows you to adjust the stereopsis, and after a day of learning the driver, and getting my brain used to it, the effect is really quite spectacular- much better than I would think I would get from the ancient tech in the red/blue glasses. Command and Conquer is awesome in 3-D. You can adjust the driver (anytime, not just in C&C) so that the 3-D gets exaggerated and it is really trippy to look deeper and deeper into your monitor. Check it out! BTW it can be kind of buggy sometimes, like if you are running a couple of different programs that use your 3-D hardware. For example, iTunes crashed because of the 3-D album art when I had C&C running in the background. It seems to be pretty easy to uninstall and reinstall, though.