Ask Slashdot: Why Is 3D Technology Stagnating So Badly? 188
dryriver writes: If you had asked someone doing 3D graphics seriously back in 2000 what 3D technology will look like two decades away in 2019, they might have said: "Most internet websites will have realtime 3D content embedded or will be completely in 3D. 3D Games will look as good as movies or reality. Everyone will have a cheap handheld 3D scanner to capture 3D models with. High-end VR headsets, gloves, bodysuits and haptics devices will be sold in electronics stores. Still and video cameras will be able to capture true holographic 3D images and video of the real world. TVs and broadcast TV content will be in holographic 3D. 3D stuff you create on a PC will be realtime -- no more waiting for images to slowly render thanks to really advanced new 3D hardware. 3D content creation software will be incredibly advanced and fast to work with in 2019. Many new types of 3D input devices will be available that make working in 3D a snap."
Except of course that that in the real 2019, none of this has come true at all, and the entire 3D field has been stagnating very, very badly since around 2010. It almost seems like a small army of 3D technology geniuses pushed and pushed 3D software and hardware hard during the 80s, 90s, 2000s, then retired or dropped off the face of the earth completely around 10 years ago. Why is this? Are consumers only interested in Facebook, YouTube, cartoony PlayStation graphics and smartphones anymore? Are we never going to see another major 3D technology innovation push again?
Except of course that that in the real 2019, none of this has come true at all, and the entire 3D field has been stagnating very, very badly since around 2010. It almost seems like a small army of 3D technology geniuses pushed and pushed 3D software and hardware hard during the 80s, 90s, 2000s, then retired or dropped off the face of the earth completely around 10 years ago. Why is this? Are consumers only interested in Facebook, YouTube, cartoony PlayStation graphics and smartphones anymore? Are we never going to see another major 3D technology innovation push again?
One product sabotaged this all: (Score:5, Insightful)
Internet Explorer. Instead of making technological progress on the web, we spent a decade or so sinking boatloads of cash into supporting their non-standard box model implementation, and a bunch of dead-end ActiveX bullshit. They probably could have cured cancer with the total amount of money that separate corporations individually pooled into making Internet Explorer look not broken.
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How in the hell is this insightful? You latched onto the first part about 3d enabled websites and completely ignored the rest. So, IE is responsible for the lack of handheld 3d scanners too? 3d on the web was a non starter for reasons other than IE anyway. Slow internet speeds, slower PC's and graphics cards and a lack of any really compelling uses were the real killer.
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First there were the weekly Flash updates, and then we got monthly malware masquerading as another weekly update. Small wonder that Steve (peace be upon him) came to reject Flash entirely.
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/whoosh
The OP was talking about history.
Because (Score:5, Insightful)
most normal people still prefer a jog in the park to a 3D game about jogging, and a real fuck to a 3D hentai video with tentacles.
Let's hope it stays that way.
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That's kind of unfair, considering how little research has been put into moving past the uncanny Marianas trench. There's simply too much bias [youtube.com] to overcome.
Or... (Score:2)
Or maybe most normal people prefer a virtually means of killing each other rather than a practical one.
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Killing each other is not part of the routine of the normal people where I come from.
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You are on ./
To most of us jogging and fucking is about as routine as killing.
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Hence the virtues of doing it virtually.
Re: Because (Score:2)
Actually there are more and more people preferring porn (in all of its varieties) to real-life sex.
I believe this isn't quite new though, there is a lot of literature about how you can achieve greater pleasure on your own than with a partner.
It turns out we like 2D more than 3D (Score:5, Insightful)
Regarding interfaces, tools, etc. -- 2D is just a whole lot easier. With 3D you need to care about depth, focusing eyes, etc. so if you can fit something into 2D it just functions better.
As far as advancement in raw processing power. Some of it is companies like NVIDIA holding back and slowing down until AMD gives them competition, but for the most part people just wildly overestimated how easy it would be to make improvements.
Excited in 1990s, but 3D is just a gimmick (Score:5, Insightful)
I got some shutter glasses in the 1990s and I was excited about the the advancements in 3D. I wrote a program similar to Microsoft Paint in 3D, which let you draw shapes are different depths and orientations. As it turns out, you're right when you say:
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Regarding interfaces, tools, etc. -- 2D is just a whole lot easier. With 3D you need to care about depth, focusing eyes, etc. so if you can fit something into 2D it just functions better.
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We COULD do a lot of things in 3D. There's no reason to.
Would you want to read 3D text? 2D is more convenient for most things.
A 3D view is handy in CAD software, and you STILL need 2D elevations to get good measurements and such. It turns out, for the 3D view ray traced "3D" that is actually 2D is fine.
So sure for a few special cases 3D is handy. For most things, it's just a gimmick that's cool to see once in a while for novelty.
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3D was overhyped from the start, along with its co-horts, AR/VR. What won? 4K, and soon 8K. Pixel density sells.
3D doesn't sell because of costs, incompatibility, horrific implementations, 3D "glasses", and lack of real immersive capabilities that make an audience or even a user, a more realistic part of the UX.
Add-in browsers that are stupid and more interested in making ad money then advancing the art, and it's just an entrepreneur's term sheet bounced from the unicorn ceiling, another would-be rich CEO c
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You've hit the nail on the head re: resolution.
The increase in processing power of graphics accelerators in the last decade has been absolutely phenomenal, especially on mobile devices.
Compare the graphics of a game released late in the life of the Playstation 3 to those currently on a Playstation 4 or a more recent PC title. Granted, there's not as much of a marked difference in quality between a Playstation 2 and Playstation 3 title, but it's amazing how much power there is. Similarly with the comparison
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VR today is absolutely nuts compared to when VR first came on the scene in the 1990s and you strapped CRTs to your head and viewed software-rendered graphics of chunky flat-shaded polygons running at maybe 20fps powered by a 486.
More like hardware rendered graphics on a top end $100,000 SGI Indigo 2.
Re:It turns out we like 2D more than 3D (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: It turns out we like 2D more than 3D (Score:4, Interesting)
^ This is a big one.
On a c64, or even an Amiga, even a programmer with zero artistic skills could make something impressive-looking. 256-color VGA raised the bar, but not insurmountably. NOW, you NEED people who are real graphic artists... and LOTS of them.
Hardware raytracing *might* temporarily lower the artistic bar... for a couple of years... but eventually, people will get tired of metallic soap bubbles, gemstones, fur, and water-reflections, and artistry will become important again.
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2D controllers and Displays (Score:2)
Regarding interfaces, tools, etc. -- 2D is just a whole lot easier.
The reason for that is that we only have 2D controllers and displays. Mice operate on a 2D plane and monitors display in a 2D plane. If we have a _true_ 3D display that we could manipulate with our hands I suspect that would change.
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Ultimately, our retinas are still 2-dimensional, and cannot distinguish 2 objects that differ only in range (i.e. same azimuth and elevation).
That's why we have two eyes. Provided the near object does not completely obscure the far object you can see that it is further away using both eyes. In terms of a 3D UI this is what we literally evolved to use. I completely agree that all attempts so far at one have been abject failures but, just like the mouse and windows for 2D, if we ever have the technology to implement a true 3D interface then I suspect we will develop the tools to make far better than 2D.
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In terms of a 3D UI this is what we literally evolved to use.
No, not really. We evolved to do things directly with 3D physical objects, but not use abstract 3D user interfaces to various things. We're actually pretty bad at making many small, precise motions significantly in 3D (i.e. away from some kind of physical support). We can make gross motions in 3D well, or precise motions close in but with a very small range of motion. Mice we can use well because they're precise motions close in with a little bit
Re:It turns out we like 2D more than 3D (Score:5, Interesting)
Im not even sure there is this stagnation. In the last year the holy grail of 3D rendering, real time high complexity ray tracing was realised, in the last few years real time match moving (proper detection and mapping of video for integrating 3d content) became possible on *telephones*, in the past 5 years GPUs have shot past CPUs in raw computational power. And Game Engines have become commoditised products affordable and driveable by the everyman.
Open source tools like blender now have full sculpting and physically based nodal texturing and can be used with Unreal or Unity to provide the same capacities Pixar or the like possesses to the home hobbyist and their friends, that with a decent CPU and 2060 or higher GPU can real time generate the same quality visuals you'd see in the theatres.
How exactly is this "Stagnated"?
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To a degree the issue is the computational barrier. With raytracing that is clearly obvious.
People have been working on how to reduce the computational problems with ray-tracing for decades. While a lot of advances were made, it still has plenty of issues. Like huge performance differences depending on your viewpoint.
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How exactly is this "Stagnated"?
It's not; Mr. "dryriver" apparently runs... pretty dry.
The tool is not the craft. (Score:2)
Open source tools like blender now have full sculpting and physically based nodal texturing and can be used with Unreal or Unity to provide the same capacities Pixar or the like possesses to the home hobbyist and their friends, that with a decent CPU and 2060 or higher GPU can real time generate the same quality visuals you'd see in the theatres.
The Disney or Pixar character begins with artist's sketches. evolving character designs. Then physical models, Then there are the complexities of movement and gesture. Character animation. Sophisticated puppetry with potentially hundreds of control lines. Then there is the highly technical problem of successfully animating fur and other textures under all lighting conditions.
Congratulations. All that you need to complete your hobbyist project in Blender is the background art,3D set design, props and spec
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I think this is the clincher in the current dearth of 3D interfaces.
Remember VRML and ActiveWorlds? They were amusing, but functionally toys. Every interaction with them in any way that might practically be useful for an average consumer (browsing, shopping, etc) is actually harder to do in 3D.
Recall Fitts' Law.
Now, for an engineer working on a 3D CAD/CAM system, or a surgeon, there's definitely room to argue that this increases efficiency.
The problem is one of impedance matching. Where it's the right tool,
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Not to mention... on a computer screen. 3D is 2D. Heck even in your eyes, 3D is 2D... So while the real world may be 3D, we really can't visually interact with it directly.
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There is a fundamental problem with 3D that 2D entirely lacks.
We. Don't. Have. Real. 3D. Displays.
What we do have is 2D displays trying to emulate 3D.
Not even binocular headsets, creating two different images for fusion, is real 3D. The difference is that the true effects of perspective on real 3D objects is not modeled accurately, and the brain detects this -- though the sensitivity to the neural distress varies with the person. Some people get nauseated or headaches with 3D, similar to how the brain respo
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We do have 3D displays: https://lookingglassfactory.co... [lookingglassfactory.com]
The smaller one is even reasonably affordable and seems to work as promised: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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When it comes to processing power though the human brain has an incredibly powerful processor that transforms physical 2D content into 3D mental content in realtime. This works far better than any currently available human-created display technology for 3D content. E.g. a movie filmed on a 2D sensor and projected on a 2D screen looks far more realistic than the best hologram, and is much easier to share with other humans as a social event.
Because kids... (Score:3)
...nothing improves automatically. It requires a lot of work to have progress, and sometimes progress never happens. Sometimes people get lazy, or get rich doing the same things over and over. So whenever you see companies that assume "geometric" progress in some area (a.k.a Tesla, most AI companies), be wary. Technological progress is not guaranteed, and progress may actually go backward.
3D will always look fake (Score:3)
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This is exactly why I rather see 2D than 3D movies.
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A good director, be it a game or film director, would use DoF as a cue to what you should be looking at.
That is one of the most obvious examples of the problem.. the moment you are forced to look at something.
Most of today's 3D movies, you actually forget that it is 3D until something jumps out of the screen at you and screams "HEY LOOK! I'M IN 3D!!"
Which instantly breaks any immersion..
from John Carmack (Score:5, Insightful)
John Carmack wrote the following about 3D interfaces and VR:
This was an internal post I made in 2017, and my position has only strengthened in the following years:
3D interfaces are usually worse than 2D interfaces.
Last year, I argued that cylindrical panels were surprisingly effective, and we should embrace them for VR Shell UI. There was a lot of push back about giving up the flexibility of putting UI wherever you want in 3D, and curtailing the imagined future world of even more 3D interfaces, but the argument for objectively higher quality with the native TimeWarp layer projection kept it from being a completely abstract design question.
Reviewing a position description before an interview last week, I saw that one of the responsibilities for the open Product Management Leader position was:
"Create a new interaction paradigm that is 3D instead of 2D based"
Sigh.
Iâ(TM)m going to try to make the abstract argument against 3D interaction paradigms more strongly now.
Obviously when you are dealing with a 3D object, as with Medium, Quill, or a 3D data visualization, then you have a 3D interface, but I contend that the majority of browsing, configuring, and selecting interactions benefit from designing in 2D.
Splitting information across multiple depths is harmful, because your eyes need to re-verge (and, we wish, re-focus). This is easy to demonstrate if you have a convenient poster across the room in your visual field above your monitor - switch back and forth between reading your monitor and the poster, then contrast with just switching back and forth with the icon bar at the bottom of your monitor.
It may be worse in VR, because you have to fight the lack of actual focus change. With varifocal we would be back to just the badness of the real world, but no better. This is fundamental to the way humans work.
There is a related notion that varifocal is a hardware feature necessary for good text readability. This is wrong - it is only important for making text at widely separated distances, like a piece of paper six inches away from your eyes and a billboard, comfortable. Static HMD optics can have their focus point put wherever we want, and we should put it at the UI distance.
If you have the freedom to place interfaces wherever you want, as we do in VR, you would not place the interfaces at common reading / monitor distances. "Reading glasses" are usually necessary specifically because older people can't force their eyes to focus so close anymore. The exact relaxed eye distance will vary from person to person, but it is going to be several meters out.
This is an advantage of VR! Focusing on close monitors all day long is a stress on your eyes that can be removed.
If you want to be able to scan information as quickly and comfortably as possible, it should all be the same distance from the viewer and it should not be too close.
Depth cues give important information when you are making sense of an environment and moving relative to elements of it. If you want to hit something with a spear or time a dodge, it is valuable information. The actions you are doing in a UI almost never benefit from this.
Your view of a 3D environment is a pair of 2D projections. Unless you move significantly relative to the environment, they stay essentially the same 2D projections. Even if you designed a truly 3D UI, you would have to consider this to keep the 3D elements from overlapping each other when projected onto the view.
I think 3D may have a small place in efficient UI design as a "treatment" for UI elements, using slightly protruding 3D buttons sticking out of the UI surface in places where you would otherwise use color changes or faux-3D effects like bevels or drop shadows. Possibly 3D modeled "icons" on the UI layer, but basically staying within a few inches of the UI surface. The visual scanning and interaction is still fundamentally 2D, but it is another channel of information that your eye will naturally pick up on. This isn'
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That was 3D user interface, not 3D content. There is some crossover, but not enough to be relevant. No one has designed a 3D UI that offers more functionality than 2D, or more ease.
It suffers from realism (Score:2, Interesting)
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What were you expecting? (Score:4, Insightful)
You seem to have fallen for the fallacy that any of this is demand driven.
What consumers want doesn't matter. What they're getting is facebook/instagram because FUCK YOU that's the most profitable, addictive arrangement that generates sustainable dominance over the consumer.
In nature larger/stronger/faster often get selected against and die out.
Likewise crappy casualized games with micro-transactions are objectively dogshit, but they are more profitable and mass market so win.
Good things are aberrations in market economies. Don't expect anything good to happen, and abandon the narrative of "progress" because it isn't a linear progression.
Sometimes the forest burns down and never grows back (because the environment shifted or the soil washed out). Sometimes everything goes to shit and never gets better.
Your favorite product will be discontinued and replaced with literal shit. It's inevitable.
Computational Complexity (Score:2)
Because Computational Complexity. I too remember reading articles around 2000 about what they thought things would be 10-20 years down the road. Nobody has given up, in fact, things are progressing nicely in the past few years in regards to ray tracing. The issue is that we underestimated the computational complexity associated with real-time lighting.
Apparently you aren't paying attention (Score:4, Insightful)
It hasn't stagnated at all. GPUs are increasing in power in leaps and bounds.
Perhaps you just underestimate how much it takes to get wherever you think it should be. But that doesn't mean it's stagnated, just that you don't understand.
Re:Apparently you aren't paying attention (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed, basically the premise is wrong. The 'everyone will have a cheap 3D scanner' was not what I recall from those days, we were looking at the then-amazing graphics of Toy Story and complaining about not having our flying cars, and later about not having our hoverboards.
3D graphics are continuing to advance, we have more immersive, more beautiful, and if you want it, more photorealistic than ever before. Most projects find that peope do not want photorealistic. There are a wide range of amazing 3D graphics styles, photorealistic is one but only a tiny sliver of popularity. Photorealistic is good for a few gritty world simulations, but there are so many other worlds to explore.
Regarding VR, you can go out today and buy a Quest for about $400, amazing VR, completely wireless so you can play on a beach or tennis court, or like most people, play in your living room without getting tangled in cords. That's at 1440x1600 per eye, 72 frames per second, both hands with great controllers, wifi multiplayer, no gaming PC needed. Those are tremendous advances in hardware.
If you want to record for stereoscopic display, if your phone doesn't support it you can get the cameras for about what webcams cost in that past era. That pushes the industry that few people admit drives tech, the porn industry, that is cranking out free 3D content as fast as people can upload it.
If you're looking at games, the current amazing games intentionally avoid photorealism. People (paying customers) generally want stylistic worlds, beautifully rendered. You won't see the cutting edge stuff if you only stick with mainstream games (which must work on any PC built in the last 8 years) but you cand find it if you are willing to look for it. And it continues to grow at a rapid pace with breathtaking results.
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... released an overclocked version, 6 months later ... demonstrably faster until ... only as fast as ... which may be no faster than ... not much faster than ... 2080Ti is still faster than anything.
Why the fixation on speeds? That hasn't been the major metric of improvements for over a decade. Manufacturing techniques have been at the limit of the speed and size of electrons for many years, new manufacturing techniques have slowly brought it down slowly, 22 nm, 16 nm, 14nm, etc, but they're pushed up against the edge of the atom. The last major change to speeds came by rotating the fins (at an atomic scale) for slightly less interference, but you're not going to see much more on that facet unless we
I'm sure 20 years after we have (Score:2)
commercial plants we'll have holodecks. And everyone knows fusion power is only 20 years off...
No one does procedural content (Score:4, Insightful)
All the technology has really done is create tons of design work. No one has the time to create 4k textures on lifelike models using traditional design tools, which impedes what we can do with the tech.
We should have been focused on procedurally generated content for the last decade or so, but that's been pushed aside in lieu of pushing more pixels. This is reality catching up to that group decision.
If you want to give it a name.. (Score:2)
Autodesk.
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Carfurniture. What a stupid name.
"Good enough". (Score:5, Insightful)
Most internet websites will have realtime 3D content embedded or will be completely in 3D.
What, on a website, could I possible need in realtime 3D? About the only thing even vaguely useful to have in 3D is to look at items in online shops, or maybe showing parts for instructions in DIY build or repair projects. But even there a fully detailed 3D model doesn't really offer much advantage over decent photographs or video from multiple angles, and is more effort and expense to implement.
3D Games will look as good as movies or reality.
Most people don't really want their games to look indistinguishable from reality, they want them to be fun. Sure for a long while everyone's been wanting game graphics to be more realistic, but we're about at the point where it's good enough for most people.
Everyone will have a cheap handheld 3D scanner to capture 3D models with.
You need certain economies of scale to make things like that cheap enough, and not enough people are so interested in being able to capture 3D models of anything they come across, or to spend the time actually doing it (it's sure as hell not going to be as fast as even professional photography where a dozen things need to be adjusted an accounted for before taking a snapshot) on some random objects out in the world, to get there.
High-end VR headsets, gloves, bodysuits and haptics devices will be sold in electronics stores.
Again... this depends largely on them being things lots of people want. That depends on there being some practical use for such things on such a mass scale.
Still and video cameras will be able to capture true holographic 3D images and video of the real world.
That's an unrealistic expectation if ever I heard one. A camera in a single position might capture a 3D image from one perspective just fine, but true holographic, no.
TVs and broadcast TV content will be in holographic 3D.
Why? What practical benefit is there to the viewing experience? Being able to go and look at something else while the action is going on is a pointless gimmick at best.
3D stuff you create on a PC will be realtime -- no more waiting for images to slowly render thanks to really advanced new 3D hardware.
Sure that'd be nice, but ultimately that's just a matter of processing power, which A) progress is no longer super quick on in general, and B) is going to have massively increasing needs if everything's getting so much more detailed.
3D content creation software will be incredibly advanced and fast to work with in 2019. Many new types of 3D input devices will be available that make working in 3D a snap.
About the only thing that would be leaps and bounds better than incremental improvements to current creation software and input methods is functional mind reading, and we're still a long way off that.
This isn't to say there couldn't be a new push of advancement in the field, but it's probably not going to be in any of the directions people were thinking about 20 years ago, and probably requires advancements in other fields before it can start to become possible.
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Also 3D content is still worth a billion in movies alone. James Cameron basically put movies on hold to help live 3D get to 2009 for Avatar. You can't argue that as insignificant, and it gets better.
Animated 3D is almost no overhead if the rendering is already 3D, so that's 10 to 12% gravy. Or easy money if you prefer. And it doesn't have the focus problem of live 3D. Or rather it has the same problem as Animated 2D content.
We have mainstream VR now. It's apparently worth the investment.
So basing the curre
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Most people don't really want their games to look indistinguishable from reality, they want them to be fun. Sure for a long while everyone's been wanting game graphics to be more realistic, but we're about at the point where it's good enough for most people.
I take issue with this, mainly because there are games on the market that actually do look indistinguishable from reality. Graphics *are* realistic. The fact that people chose to play Mario doesn't change the achievements of the likes of Metro Exodus.
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I think it really is as simple as that. We've reached the point of diminishing returns, at least for the current level of technology for the forseeable future. We have computer games that use 2-D video that by any measure is vastly less realistic looking than even basic still photography, but game players are perfectly happy with it. The experience doesn't actually need any more. In fact the fake quality is probably adding something to making it easier to immerse yourself in a fictional world. And thes
The tools suck and.. (Score:3, Interesting)
... the videogame industry and software got to prevent software ownership with DRM. Which stopped video game companies by and large from releasong mod tools with their AAA games so innovation in tools stopped because of drm and microtransactions. This is especially apparent considering that the last 20 years of PC gaming has been one of theft and larceny with the shift that began with the rebrand of RPG's as mmo's in the late 90's with the rpg Ultima series. Which lead to the rise of steam in 2004.
Then wow hit also in 2004, notice that Starcraft remastered and war 3 are drm'd out the wazoo whereas before they were stand alone games, even though they are the same game. Same thing happened with quake 3 vs quake live (same game but one is drm'd and the other isn't).
So the big shift over the last 10 years has been to move every "game" to the cloud where they drip feed you files/packets from the mothership with no software ownership and privacy. The public getting internet just allowed game companies to walk in and steal everything and get too much power. So they have no incentive to make tools and programming SDK's public... think of the latest Doom 2016.... this could have been a return to form with open modding and tools, but it's one of the most locked down releases in recent memory with fucking "matchmaking" instead of lan and dedicated servers, from iD software no less. Same goes for quake champions, an locked down f2p lootbox ridden garbage game.
Without an open ecosystem innovation slows down and it's because of the perverse incentives the internet has created for easy money by bicycle chaining software and taking it hostage on company computers across the internet.
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People don't want to be bothered with the glasses (Score:2)
When you make the experience of watching something in 3D as easy as watching television is right now then maybe it'll gain some more traction. Most people don't want to have to deal with the special glasses in order to watch a 3D program, especially since they cost a lot and they don't include many. So you have to buy a bunch of extra for the few times you have many people over. Supposedly on television the 3D only really adds something to sports. I know that when I see a 3D movie in the theatre I don't get
1970 is calling (Score:2)
Re: 1970 is calling (Score:2)
We also hit a speedbump with LCD displays and active shutter glasses prior to LED backlighting. C
CRTs and DLP worked well with shutter glasses. CCFL-backlit LCDs didn't. This was one of the things that caused "3D-ready" TVs to vanish. Most 3D-ready TVs were DLP, because most DLP TVs used diagonal interlacing. DLP fell out of popularity 2-3 years before LCD displays with LED backlighting became common, and LCD TVs with CCFL backlights had too much crosstalk for acceptable 3D via shutter glasses.
Re: 1970 is calling (Score:2)
CRT was a mixed bag. From what I remember from Nvidia's first stab at CRT+shutter 3D, flicker was the real problem with CRT, not persistence-induced crosstalk.
Harder to produce (Score:3)
Most internet websites will have realtime 3D content embedded or will be completely in 3D.
This one is pretty easy to understand.
Want to create a simple website? Write some text, find some gifs and midis, use some html glue to put it all together, then upload to a hosting service. Done. So easy that a child can do it, and many did.
Want to create a 3D website, though? Then you need to know how to do 3D modeling. That's a much less common skill. So you have to make a greater effort to give a tiny audience an experience that's not necessarily any better than sticking to plain 2D.
It hasn't. (Score:4, Insightful)
3D technology has continued to advance at breakneck pace. But it isn't as apparent, because of diminishing returns.
The farther we go, the more power it takes to achieve what we perceive as the "next step".
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But it isn't as apparent, because of diminishing returns.
It isn't particularly apparent because so far it's been effecting us in minor evolutionary rather than revolutionary ways... but rest assured augmented reality will change much about we interact with each other (hope by then to be living somewhere in the mountains of Papua but I suspect I'll still be stuck here, still dealing with the rest of you fuckers).
WTF is OP babbling about? (Score:2)
Op could just google this stuff, any of this stuff. Instead they complain and whine.
Easy, only one way to make money (Score:3)
This is too easy. There is only one way to make serious money in 3D, and that is to sell a GPU. If you are a talented dev thinking about making the big bucks writing 3D software, just don't be stupid. Glory days of 3D software are behind us, kids. From now it it's strictly an occupation for downtrodden peons slaving away in the subbasement of some hardware seller.
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Consumption of 3D content (eg. video games) is also big business - GTA5 is the most profitable media title in history.
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Don't forget to get your preemptive lobotomy before going to work in a game sweatshop.
Re: Easy, only one way to make money (Score:2)
It shows there's plenty enough money being made by 3D content for people to be paid a decent wage. If you want to know why they aren't then just look at everything else unregulated free-market capitalism has touched...
Because it is not real 3d (Score:2, Troll)
Most of our "3d" technology is really just 2d being manipulated to trick us into thinking we are seeing 3d. Our brains are well aware of what is going on and it causes us stress naturally to have to process the trickery bullshit happening in front of our eyes and brains. Yes, it is cool for a few minutes but the brain gets tired of having to re-translate odd images to make sense of them for you to understand. The brain is already able to translate true 3d so facsimile versions of 3d that are not actual 3
Not everyone can even see in 3D (Score:2)
Those of us with eye issues don't ever see in binocular vision 3d and some of us are bemused by the lack of interest by people generally.
No binocular vision (Score:3)
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It was a thing (Score:2)
People saw the results and understood more GPU and CPU power was not going to make something bad better.
The smart people moved to better computer products/services/design/network tasks.
The people after the mid 1990's "discover" 3D again and think they can make it better as "GPU" and "CPU" was missing in the past.
They fail and discover what was well understood years ago.
3D on the face is no fun no matter how much math, GPU and CPU is used.
Want to do 3D? Create a media room
Smartphones happened (Score:3)
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Also we're all kinda poor having to buy new smartphones every 12-18 months due to planned obsolence.
That's your own [stupid] choice; I buy used phones on craigslist and ebay every 12-18 months for between $80 and $130.... but my current phone (generic quad-core Samsung) was fifty bucks on markdown at Walmart.
"It's your decisions, stupid."
Maybe its not that useful (Score:2)
Human eyes are 2D. There are 2 of them, but the information they transmit is still 2d, so 3d imaging doesn't greatly increase the data rate.
In many situations human see in 2D - basically anything more than a few meters away, human depth perception doesn't do much. It drives me crazy when 3d movies enhance the effect so that what should be a battle between kilometer-long starships becomes a battle between few centimeter long ships fighting for control of the bridge of my nose.
There are some special applic
Most of that did happen (Score:2)
To be honest most of that did happen, just sometimes no-one wanted it -
"Most internet websites will have realtime 3D content embedded or will be completely in 3D" - It exists (VRML and then WebGL) but it wasn't popular
"3D Games will look as good as movies or reality" - I'd say we're getting close to this
"Everyone will have a cheap handheld 3D scanner to capture 3D models with" - This exists (photogrammetry smartphone apps) but is still a bit rough quality
"High-end VR headsets, gloves, bodysuits and
Assuming prediction is based in fact (Score:2)
Back in the 1920's "they" predicted we'd all be working 3 day work weeks, have flying cars and sit around our pools being served drinks by our household robots as the post WWI Technocracy movement became more mainstream. Where's my martini, robot?
Starting the discussion with a suggestion that somehow we have failed ourselves by not living up to some bullshit predictions by people very much invested in those predictions is some sweet, sweet navel-gazing.
It is _obvious_... (Score:2)
And it was obvious back then. "3D content" is far harder to create and far harder to consume. If you actually want to get a message across, it is the wrong approach. And that is already it. Obvious.
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None of this happened? (Score:2)
That you don't do your research is not evidence of none of it happening. Hyper realistic games like Metro Exodus do exist, you should play them.
Grab yourself a Oculus Rift, download some 6K porn and tell us what you're still missing from your 3D experience.
Have a rotating plate? Throw your phone on with a scanning app to do complete 3D scan of any object, if you want you can then even 3D print the result.
TV broadcast was in 3D, consumers rejected the idea. It's not the technology was failing.
As for designin
3D Causes Discomfort (Score:2)
Just my opinion, but:
I hate to play generation warfare, but... (Score:2)
Could it be that Millennials have gotten used to spending so much time on screens that the third dimension is no longer important to them?
One moment ... (Score:2)
"Most internet websites will have realtime 3D content embedded or will be completely in 3D."
Imagine FoxNews and Breitbart, not only before you on a small screen, but also behind you and all around.
Oh, the horror!
Because 3D benefits are way smaller (Score:3)
Think about ordinary television, for the last 100 years. 90% of television shows work fine when you aren't looking at them. The same 90% fall apart when you turn off the sound. Most television shows are more audio-important than visual-important. Comedies are funny to hear, few are funny to watch. Even sports, which ought to be 100% visual, have commentators so you don't need to watch them at all -- they don't have any commentators when you go to the stadium, by the way.
Ergo, television is, primarily, an aural presentation, not a visual one.
Similarly, news articles, web-sites, recipes, and slashdot, are mostly text. Very few web-sites have pictures and no text. Most are primarily text. Even fewer are video.
Humans have always communicated in 2D -- smoke signals, writing in the sand, on cave walls, facial expressions, signs, traffic signals.
But's there's a very common thread throughout all of this: it's way more efficient to operate in 2D, simply because we live in 3D.
How many 2D panes can you have in a 3D world? Infinite. How many 2D panes can you see at the same time? Infinite. How many 2D layers can you overlap? Infinite. Alas, 3D spaces you can only have one at a time, only one in a space, and only one "layer" of different scale.
There's simply very little benefit to 3D beyond the immersive experience itself, and the "immersive" part doesn't add anything beyond realism.
Animated cartoons are about as 2D as it gets. Bugs Bunny isn't more funny in 3D. Navigating slashdot in moving 3D layers of texts isn't faster to read.
But hey, we can look at it another way. When I taught my then-70-year old grandmother to use a computer, I taught her about the then-modern desktop OS, and described it to her as "a 3D surface" -- it's a two-dimensional "surface" (the screen) but each application window can be on-top of another.
That's 3D! Overlapping/occluding windows is absolutely 3D. And thirty years ago, it didn't exist. And on most phones these days, it doesn't exist. But on desktop operating systems, it's been around for decades. We've gone so far as to take the third dimension (i.e. overlapping application windows) and compressed it into a zero-depth surface (i.e. the monitor's screen).
So we have the real-world benefits of 3D -- more things -- with the real-world benefits of 2D -- smaller space.
We also have overpasses, underpasses, tunnels, and bridges so our roads can fly across each other in the third dimension -- so our cars don't need to fly.
So there. We do have 3D. It's just been made better.
This guy is very confised (Score:2)
He seems to be mixing up Computer Generated Graphics, Stereoscopic projection, and VR as the same thing. CG has continued to to be developed at a steady pace, stereo is dead....as it should be, and VR has it's starts and stops as it always has.
To the Uncanny Valley and Beyond! (Score:2)
Once 3D reaches the edge of the uncanny valley further improvements don't provide a better experience.
We already complain about "unrealistic" characters in movies with live actors.
No matter how good your 3D gets, it's not going to be better than filming real people.
Doing better requires improvements in kinematics (how people move), in direction (where people move) and story (why people move).
A 3D website?
I'm usually more interested in a website's text - images are already pushing it.
If I browse to a site an
2019 hindsight, not 2000 hindsight (Score:2)
First up, the first half is a total straw man. Nobody in 2000 was predicting that stuff. Your argument is then that the industry "stagnated" because it failed to meet those expectations, yet, that's a straw-man argument because those predictions were ones that you, OP, made up yourself, which are heavily colored by what's current in 2019.
"Most internet websites will have realtime 3D content embedded or will be completely in 3D."
- oh, like embedded midi and flash animations but in 3D? The *market* we
3D vision is physically impossible (Score:2)
In order to see something in n dimensions, the ray of light takes up one dimension, so you can only really see n-1 dimensions at a time. Our eyes are 2D surfaces. A true 3D display would be something you can walk around to see all the different angles. Instead, we spend a great deal of computing power on projecting 3D worlds onto 2D displays.
They were right (Score:2)
Almost almost all of the examples mentioned are commonplace today, 3D website excepted. Games look incredible, phone apps can capture mesh with photogrammetry, there are lots of VR headset and motion control options at stores, there are 3D and 360 degree cameras with support in video players and headsets, many movies are released in 3D, consoles render graphics in real time, there are now video cards that can do real time ray tracing and anyone can use a huge swath of 3D content creation tools for free.
Couldn't be more wrong (Score:2)
First, no one "doing 3D graphics seriously in 2000" would have made such ridiculous statements. 3D films, 3D UI, VR, they're all terrible ideas.
Second, not all of the claimed future advances are not true. We did get better tools to design 3D models, and they do work in real time. 3D modeling has also become commonplace even to create 2D artwork or animation.
Value added is low (Score:2)
3D doesn't provide that much more information to the brain.
That's what it's all about, understanding what's going on, and mostly you can get all you need with just 2D. If you could play a game better with 3D inputs, because of all the extra understanding you have of the game problem, everybody would have flocked to it. Ditto, if you could appreciate, say, and action/fight scene in a movie, better. [Instead, 3D movies actually reduce your ability to handle fast-moving action scenes by adding to the perc
Mobile happened (Score:2)
A big factor is the switch to portability. The computers that most people use haven't gotten a lot more powerful in the past ten years. High end desktop systems have but fewer people are using those. The story now is making technology more portable: phones, tablets, and ultraportable laptops with the emphasis on light weight and battery life rather than computing power.
But there is also the fact that 3D developers failed to make a sufficiently compelling case for their wares. If they had, people might still
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Parametric CAD has been a thing for a very long time, and there's a good reason it's not taken over direct modelling for non-technical 3D work...
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You know that probably would have worked just fine with Google cardboard content, they usually do.
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The issues with eye strain are typically because you need to calibrate the glasses to the individual person. You basically need an optometrist to adjust every set of glasses. Or to come up with some way to make the glasses adjust themselves. In my experience most issues with nausea are due to sight alignment problems like strabismus (i.e. being cross-eyed). A lot of people have minute issue with that and don't even realize it. It is when you splat something on their face like an HMD that problems creep up.
W
Re: Glasses and Nausea (Score:2)
Lag is also a major problem with so-called "pass-through AR" (using cameras to capture realtime view of environment, then overlaying content on top). To achieve optical transparency (zero perceived lag between event, its capture by camera, its rendering to a display, and its viewing by the user), you need framerates above 400fps... sometimes (high-contrast, peripheral vision) 1000fps or more.
Now, you *don't* necessarily have to render the synthetic content at 400fps+, especially if it's a small part of the
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attempts at 3D movies gave some people headaches, and caused eye strain
FTFY. The main problems with 3d are: 1) it's hard / expensive to do 3d well. Many movies still end up doing it like Jaws 3D, but a few directors like Cameron know how to do 3D, and are willing to take the extra effort. Avatar might be a bit lame story-wise, but the immersion was mind-blowing in the cinema. Which brings us to point 2): 3D only really works well in the cinema. Simple physics: the depth budget in 3D movies is directly related to the distance to the screen. In a home theatre setup it is r