The Movie Studios' Big 3D Scam

Are we ready for 3D? As CG supervisor and avid moviegoer, I'm sad to say that I'm not convinced we are. Yet. And the worse is yet to come, as studios try to milk us all for these half-baked goods.

The only time that I have felt it was worth it was Avatar and even then I wanted to yank the damn thick-rimmed glasses off my face every 3 minutes.

The good Avatar 3D experience happened because James Cameron is a technically savvy director, and thus the 3D aspect of Avatar was technically well executed. When done right it allows the viewer to more seamlessly enjoy a 3D film. Done poorly and all it does is get in the way. One of the reasons I'm not digging it is that many of the stereoscopic movies have been made 3D after they were shot, which can cause heaps of distractions in the final product. Even if the film was originally shot 3D it takes someone knowledgeable in the field to make it effective. Decisions on convergence between the left and right eyes are just as much a part of the visual storytelling as lens choices, lighting, rack focusing, etc. If you overlook that you get a sloppy 3D experience.


The problem with fake 3D

The process of making a movie 3D after it was shot is a complicated and time consuming process but can be somewhat convincing. The problem is it will never reflect the same results as if you were filming using two cameras, simultaneously, from slightly different perspectives. Endless rotoscoping provides layers that can be separated to fake a different perspective for the second eye, but that's what it looks like, layers. So yes, you can push things away and pull things forward and enhance the depth, but the content within each layer has no depth. We use our eyes everyday and whether you know the geek stuff or not it's just not what we are used to seeing. The stereo technicians involved in bringing the images to us in 3D in the best possible way have their hands tied in some ways, they're not often working with two true perspectives.


The problem is it's expensive and difficult to do it right. Double the camera gear means double the footage and often doubling the camera crew. It also doubles much of the visual effects work as you have to render everything twice. A lot of the old gags we once used to do our "movie magic" no longer work in stereo films.

But what you get is the real thing, a true stereo view of everything in the frame. Just like a director or cinematographer chooses to focus the camera to direct the viewers eye you must make the same decisions in 3D to direct the convergence of the two eyes. Not doing this right (or having to do it with a faked perspective in the second eye) is like overlooking composition or sound design, it's crummy movie making.

Avatar hit this right. They shot it stereo and kept all the depth within screen like it was a window into another world and never tried to wow you with shoving stuff into the theater at you. When you bring elements of the image into the room you run into the problem of the edge of frame cropping the content. During the end titles for Alice In Wonderland they created a false black edge to the screen so that when content did break frame and bring things into the theater they weren't cut off. But this isn't an option for the duration of the movie unless you're willing to give up valuable screen space. IMAX helps relieve this by filling your field of view but we are all far from having IMAX theaters at every cinema and you still have a limited view from within the frame of the glasses.

Milking the 3D cow

This problem will get even worse when you all get sucked into buying a 3D TV for your living room where the size of the screen fills even less of your view. And now there's talk on the rumor mill of re-releasing Titanic in 3D? Watch out for a flood of classics being shoved down the fake stereoscopic pipeline and into your Blu-ray player for an extra $10. Hopefully Cameron will continue to help set a higher standard.

And there's the final nail in this absurd 3D show: The eyeglasses. Simply, watching a $200+ million dollar movie with $.03 crappy plastic glasses is just silly. They are not only optically poor but they take almost a full stop of light out of the image. That's almost half the amount of light! None of the prints or projectors I have seen3D movies in properly compensate to counteract that loss of light. When I saw Alice In Wonderland at one of the industry screenings—where you think it would be dialed in just right—the image was still painfully dark. The situation in a majority of theaters out there is as bad or worse.

In the end, do it right or just don't do it. Or more importantly, for all the studio execs out there, just because we can doesn't mean we should.

Internet Explorer 9: A Fresh Start, With HTML5

Ninth time's the charm, sometimes! At least that's Microsoft's hope with IE9, which they've just announced at Mix, brings new HTML5 support (including HTML5 video!), hardware-accelerated graphics for text and images, and a totally new JavaScript engine.

Microsoft's just demoed the latest build of IE9, the final version of which doesn't yet have a release date, and for something as sleepy as a browser, it's pretty cool. Here's what's new:

HTML5

HTML5 is basically the talk of the town right now, assuming your town is populated exclusively by web developers and Apple apologists. It's magic! It's going to save the internet! It's going to kill Flash! Etc. But really, it's more subtle than that: It's the next version of the entire language that underlies the web—HTML—and it supports a lot of interesting features, which will make websites behave more like apps. Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera have pretty much left Microsoft in the dust in terms for HTML5 support. Until now! Here are the HTML5 features Microsoft says IE9 will support:

• h.264 video: When people talk about HTML5 killing Flash, this is what they're talking about. Some video sites, like YouTube and Vimeo, have been experimenting with video playback that doesn't require a plugin to play. h.264 is the format standard the big sites have chosen to go with, and now Internet Explorer will support it.

• Embedded Audio: Just as the video tag allows for video to be embedded directly into a page without a plugin, the audio tag allows audio files to be embedded straight into the page. IE9 supports MP3/AAC codecs.

• Scalable Vector Graphics: Scalable vector graphics allow for the creation of certain types of graphics that scale perfectly—because they're drawn as vectors, not plain images. It can also allow for rudimentary, Flash-style animations.

• CSS3: CSS is essentially what the web is formatted with, and Internet Explorer's various CSS compatibilities have been maddening since, well, forever. IE9 supports more standards-based CSS3—including Selectors, Namespaces, Color, Values, Backgrounds and Borders and fonts—and should support more before launch. They're finally trying, is the point.

The New JavaScript Engine

Modern web apps are loaded with JavaScript, to the point that new browsers are practically measured by how fast they can render it. (A faster JavaScript engine means sites like Gmail, Facebook and even Gizmodo don't just load faster, but run more quickly.) Here's how Microsoft says IE9 measures up right now:

Keep in mind that this is a WebKit-designed test, and that IE9 isn't ready for release yet—Microsoft says they'll still improve the rendering speed. And really, while IE9 might not outpace the fastest browsers out there, it's at least close. And hilariously faster than IE8. In the onstage demo, IE9 didn't do terribly well on the Acid3 test, either, scoring a mediocre 55/100, which they vowed to improve. But again, they're at least trying, and when you've got the market share (and history of ignoring standards) that Microsoft does, this is, again, worth a lot.

2D Acceleration

Internet Explorer nine adds DirectX video acceleration for SVG graphics and even text rendering, which will make some SVG graphics and CSS3 rendering faster, but also applies to text rendering, which makes the entire browsing process a bit smoother.

HTML5 video rendering is much, much smoother than in Chrome (demonstrated onstage), simply because of Direct2D video rendering—Microsoft was able to demonstrate two 720p HD videos playing smoothly in the same browser window, while Chrome choked on just one. Getting this acceleration doesn't require any extra code on the website's part, though developers won't be able to depend on this kind of video acceleration in their webpages, since it's unique to IE9 and Windows, for now. More than allowing for absurd demos like this, what this means is that any video played back via the video tag in IE9 will simply use less CPU power than it would in another browser, which is an objective improvement. (Note: This won't be available on Windows XP.)

Additionally, some Javascript rendering can also be offloaded to the GPU, which, again, helps speed along rendering and responsiveness for complicated web apps.

A lot of what Microsoft is doing here could be accurately described as catchup. And aside from the 2D acceleration features, there's really not much new here, as far as your average browser is concerned. But Internet Explorer adoption is inevitable, and for Microsoft to embrace modern web standards—at least more than they have in the past—will have a measurable, positive effect on the internet, and the people who browse it. (From work, which I'm fairly sure is the only place where the computer-literate people use IE anyway.)

The Preview

You can actually try it now, though some of the features—most conspiciously HTML5 video—aren't yet there, and the interface is still pretty barebones. (There's no proper address bar, for example, but just a "go to" popup window. This is a developers' test tool, really.) The download's available here.

Windows Phone 7's Impossible App Mission

Microsoft's already done a lot right with Windows Phone 7, and it's not even out until late this year. But after today's announcements, there's one lingering question: How can Windows Phone 7 possibly catch up, in terms of apps?

To be clear, the problem is as follows: When Windows phone 7 launches later this year, it will face the same Catch-22 as any new app platform does: Without an audience to sell to, why would developers invest in creating complicated apps? And if a platform doesn't have these great apps, why would people switch to it?

It's something I've been wondering about since the day we found out that Windows Phone 7, despite a February unveiling and a March developers' announcement, won't actually ship until the end of this year, and which I was hoping might be cleared up today. It wasn't.

We only have to look as far as Palm to see that getting apps off to a slow start can be severely detrimental—even fatal—to a platform. But a comparison to webOS, or even Android, doesn't do Windows Phone 7's situation justice. By the end of this year, the platforms WinPho 7 will be competing with—namely iPhone and Android—will be even more deeply entrenched with users than they are now. And the same goes for developers: The 30,000+ apps in the Android Market are trending skyward, and the 140,000+ apps in App Store aren't showing any signs of slowing down, not to mention the iPad apps that are about to flood the index. Now, I know sheer quanity of apps doesn't mean everything, but it means something—the iPhone's got a better selection of great apps than Android, and Android's got a better selection of great apps than webOS or BlackBerry. So, come holiday season 2010, smartphone buyers will have a choice between phones with a vast library of apps to do just about anything you can think of, and Windows Phone 7.

So what can Microsoft possibly do? I didn't know, so I asked Microsoft Developer Division VP Scott Gutrie, How bring people to your platform?

It's a lot easier to build a Windows Phone app compared to, say, an iPhone or Android App now. Ultimately developers are interested in, can I build cool apps? Is it easy? How painful is it? Can I make money?

To a degree, he's right. Microsoft has seriously lowered the entry barriers for Windows Phone 7 app development, setting development tools free as of today, and demonstrating on stage how simple it is to create an app from scratch. (Guthrie himself created a barebones Twitter app in real real time in front of the audience.) And yeah, the launch partners announced today are pretty great.

I think this event, and this conference, hopefully catapults interest, and based on the success we've had in the last three weeks, in terms of getting some of these partners interested... I feel pretty confident we're going to have a pretty wide range of apps available at launch.

And they will! But you know who else had fantastic launch partners? Palm. Gathering a bunch of high profile names on short notice is a PR coup, but it's not a long-term salve.

The real question is, how do you lure developers away from established, surefire moneymakers, like the App Store, or increasingly, the Android Market? What do you say to an iPhone developer right now, when you don't have a product in consumers' hands? Joe Belfiore:

If I were sitting here face to face with an iPhone app developer now, I'd say, I think we're worthy of consideration. I think, hopefully, if people have seen the user experience we're building, and seen some of the reception and reaction that's happened, with real people in the real world looking at what the story is, that at minimum, it piques their interest and says, this looks like a smartphone platform that's going to have some degree of success.

This is Microsoft's struggle: To convince developers that, despite a release date of late 2010, minimal hardware announcements, an entirely new platform and user experience (which most of them will not experience on hardware before launch), they should invest time and money in Windows Phone 7. They're making the literal act of developing as simple and inviting as possible; they're giving developers a massive lead time to develop, and get familiar with the tools; they're garnering as much hype with the public as they can.

But what Microsoft can't do is will Window Phone 7 handsets into the public's hands. They're going to have to earn that, and they're going to need developers' help. And as excited as they—and we—might be about this thing, the earliest we could hope for Windows Phone 7 to have the kind of app power it needs to be competitive with the smartphone giants—who, by the way, aren't going to be sitting still for the next year—is the middle of 2011. That's the Windows Phone 7 problem—and it's out of Microsoft's hands.