Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Avatar 3D worth it...


I just got back from watching Avatar in the cinema this time, in much higher quality and in anaglyph 3D; actually I started out at the wrong cinema, Finnkino in Kaisaniemi; luckily the one in Kamppi is only a few minutes walk away.

I've mentioned before that usually these anaglyph 3D effects don't work very well for me due to varying degrees of myopia in both of my eyes, but I thought the movie was visually cool enough to give it a try with contact lenses instead of my normal glasses. I think this helped the effect significantly, but I still get the feeling that my brain starts to adjust to the effect over time so it's most impressive at the start of the movie.

This peaked my interest in ioquake3's anaglyph rendering mode, but unfortunately they ask for the glasses back after the movie, so no chance of trying it out (at least until I order a pair of my own.)

Anaglyph 3D on the N900 might be quite interesting, but of course I would either need to make much more efficient use of vertex buffer objects to make up for halving the FPS, or do a port of XreaL...

I think the later option is better for several reasons, but we'll see; Python, SCons and Scratchbox is a whole bundle of pain that I really don't want to be getting into at 02:00 in the morning.

4 comments:

  1. Piqued your interest? Just taking a peak at your blog.

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  2. I'm sure the 3D version they're showing in Germany isn't Anaglyph but RealD 3D using left and right circular polarisation. In fact here they're selling take-away glasses for 1 Euro each too, a move which some newspapers have named subsidising plastic trash.

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  3. Kshitij, thanks for pointing that out. I will have to do some more research into the different kinds of 3D glasses available.

    I was impressed with the quality of the effect. At least at the start of the movie; perhaps that's where they spent the money on the 3D effects, or my brain got used to the effect after some time...

    I agree, it's quite possible they are using some newer technology than the ordinary red/cyan anaglyph glasses.

    I did notice flicker after looking at my N900 screen after the movie when I forgot to take the glasses off. This might hint at the polarization technology?

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