1. “THE CASE IS CLOSED”

“For general use the single-tone [black-and-white] pictures will enormously prevail." — Rupert Hughes, screenwriter, 1923

“[Sound film] is an exhausted toy, ready to be cast aside.”—David Belasco, playwright, 1930

“Television won't last. It's a flash in the pan.”—Mary Somerville, radio broadcaster, 1948

Roger Ebert knows that 3D movies just don’t work—and they never will. This past January, he wrote: “The notion that we are asked to pay a premium to witness an inferior and inherently brain-confusing image is outrageous. The case is closed.”

As Exhibit A in support of this verdict, Ebert furnished a letter from Walter Murch, the acclaimed editor of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now. Murch has a theory about how 3D films befuddle our eyes and brain, by confounding their natural convergence and focus reflexes: “They are doing something that 600 million years of evolution never prepared them for. This is a deep problem, which no amount of technical tweaking can fix.”

Ebert and Murch aren’t the only ones who find 3D movies unpleasant, unnatural, and generally unfit for human consumption. It’s estimated that 2% to 12% of the population is “stereo blind” to some degree: unable to see fully in three dimensions. This includes people with eye alignment disorders like amblyopia or strabismus (which can sometimes be corrected with therapy), people with certain optic nerve defects and, of course, those with only one functional eye.

And some people with fully working binocular vision nonetheless consider 3D films to be a headache-inducing waste of time and money. Two years after the phenomenal success of Avatar, with a host of rather more shoddily crafted stereoscopic spectacles having come and gone in the interim, there’s talk of a “3D backlash,” and studios are scaling down their plans for new 3D extravaganzas.

But I submit that Ebert is seriously mistaken. I’ve been intrigued by 3D since first picking up a View-Master as a child, and I’ve come to understand it much better in the course of producing my own stereo images over the past couple of years. What I’ve learned about the history of the medium, how it works, why it sometimes doesn’t work, and how it’s currently evolving has convinced me that it’s here to stay.

2. “WE CLASP AN OBJECT WITH OUR EYES”

Stereography—the art and science of creating artificial three-dimensional images—has its roots in the early 19th century. British scientist Charles Wheatstone crucially summarized the theory of stereo vision in a landmark 1838 paper presented to the Royal Society: “[T]he mind perceives an object of three dimensions by means of the two dissimilar pictures projected by it on the two retinæ.”

Meanwhile, across the Channel, Louis Daguerre was developing his eponymous photographic process. Very quickly, these two discoveries were combined to create stereoscopic photography. By the 1850s, David Brewster’s stereo viewing devices—recognizable ancestors of the View-Master—had infiltrated many homes. The public appetite for stereo images was fed by firms like the London Stereoscopic Company; in its first two years of business, it sold over half a million stereoview cards, each bearing a pair of photographs taken simultaneously from adjacent viewpoints.

In an 1859 essay in The Atlantic, Oliver Wendell Holmes described binocular vision in vivid metaphor:

“We see something with the second eye which we did not see with the first; in other words, the two eyes see different pictures of the same thing, for the obvious reason that they look from points two or three inches apart. By means of these two different views of an object, the mind, as it were, feels round it and gets an idea of its solidity. We clasp an object with our eyes, as with our arms, or with our hands, or with our thumb and finger, and then we know it to be something more than a surface.”

Holmes, a great stereoscopy enthusiast, developed his own immensely popular lightweight stereo viewer design. You can still buy or build a Holmes-style stereoscope, but with a little practice, you may be able to “freeview” side-by-side stereo images without any special gear, by letting your eyes drift until the pictures converge.

Old stereo view cards aren’t hard to find; they turn up frequently at flea markets and junk shops. Online, the New York Public Library has over 42,000 stereographs of American subjects in its collection. There are countless vintage 3D images floating around elsewhere on the Internet, including pictures of world landmarks, non-Western cultures and (inevitably) naked ladies.

Victorian stereo views were the virtual reality of their era, but the faded images are something more than that now: for us, they’re a form of time travel. Viewing a 3D portrait of Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain or Charles Dickens taken over a century ago is like looking through a slightly dusty window into a living past.

3. BOOMS AND BUSTS

The first major wave of 3D films were produced almost 90 years ago. At least 13 films using the anaglyph process (which requires glasses with 2 different-colored lenses, usually red and blue) were released between 1922 and 1925.

This was an era of experimentation; filmmakers were also beginning to explore color and sound as ways to add new dimensions to the cinematic experience. But after the success of 1927’s The Jazz Singer, sound won out, and color and 3D were virtually abandoned.

By the early 1950s, color finally began to take hold in Hollywood. A newer 3D process, using different types of polarizing filters for the left and right eye, conveyed stereo images without anaglyph’s color distortions. Studio bosses, worried about their audiences being stolen away by television, saw 3D as a way to kick the theatrical experience up a notch, and perhaps keep more bodies in seats.

The dozens of new 3D features produced during the first half of the decade included popular titles like Bwana Devil, House of Wax and Kiss Me Kate. But the costs of shipping two prints for a 3D feature, instead of one for a conventional film, and the technical complexities of keeping two projectors in sync and in focus (or else inducing audience eyestrain), proved too burdensome for studios, distributors and theaters. The boom ended so abruptly that Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder, shot in 3D, had been downgraded to a 2D release by the time it hit screens in 1954.

The 3D medium lay mostly dormant until the 1970s, when it was used for a string of low-budget porn titles. (First link especially NSFW.) The major studios starting nosing around the technology again at the dawn of the 1980s, as they perceived a new threat emerging: the VCR. But moviegoers had mixed responses to high-profile releases like Jaws 3D and Friday the 13th Part 3. Once again, the expense and hassle of shooting, editing, printing and distributing three-dimensional films didn’t seem worth the modest box office boost. After 1986, no commercial 3D features were produced for the rest of the decade.

Over the course of the '90s, 3D re-emerged within the growing network of large-format IMAX theaters affiliated with museums and theme parks. Unsurprisingly, most of the films produced were nature documentaries or family fare. Shooting and projecting on 70mm film made for better image quality than ever before, and a high degree of technical precision at every stage minimized viewer discomfort. The IMAX 3D trend grew slowly into the 2000s.

By 2007, another 3D wave seemed to be rising. Once again, Hollywood faced disruptive competition from emerging media: HDTV and file-sharing were leading many viewers to skip the theater experience altogether. The industry geared up to give stereography another try, with a new generation of technology that would further simplify and improve the process. Digital projection systems, already being rolled out in theaters, could be configured for perfectly synchronized, sharply focused 3D much more easily than the mechanical projectors of yore.

That year, CGI animators recreated the physical sets and puppets for Tim Burton’s stop-motion animation feature The Nightmare Before Christmas in order to generate a second point of view for each frame of the film. Harry Potter and friends rode their brooms into the third dimension for the first time. And the buzz began to grow about a potentially game-changing 3D epic from James Cameron.

Avatar unspooled in late 2009. Notwithstanding a cliché storyline, its impeccable stereo visuals were a mystical prog rock album cover come to life. By the time it broke all previous box office records, scarcely a month after its release, every producer in Tinseltown was scrambling for a 3D project.

4. MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE

The elaborate processes involved in creating and delivering 3D content are supposed to deliver a more naturalistic viewing experience. The obvious irony is that from start to finish, stereography involves far more artifice than 2D image-making: double camera systems, complex editing and special effects workflows, custom projection equipment and usually some variety of special glasses.

Several different types of 3D imaging technology are in wide use these days. The oldest, dating back to 1853, is anaglyph, characterized by those red and blue (or more rarely, blue and amber) glasses. In the anaglyph process, the picture intended for the left eye is rendered in a color that’s completely absent from the image going to the right eye, and vice versa. Each lens is precisely tinted to let only one of the images through, even when the two images are superimposed on a screen or in a photographic print.

Since it’s color-based, anaglyph tends to garishly distort the hues of full-color subjects. But if the images to be conveyed are black and white, the anaglyph process doesn’t make much difference; each eye will see a monochromatic picture, and the brain can merge them effectively. Anaglyph 3D has enjoyed a DIY renaissance in the Internet era, because it can be created fairly easily with a pair of cameras and some free software, it can be displayed on any computer monitor, and it can be viewed with cheap paper glasses (you can order a free pair here).

There’s now anaglyph 3D content galore on Flickr and YouTube. NASA has even released some remarkable anaglyph images taken on the surface of Mars by paired cameras on its rovers.

But anaglyph glasses are useless in a contemporary movie theater. Polarization has been the preferred 3D theatrical projection system for over half a century (with RealD’s digital version being the current market leader). Polarized 3D was invented by Edwin Land, father of the Polaroid camera, and uses lenses which invisibly align light waves in one of two different directions. Two pictures, each projected in differently-polarized light, are combined on a screen, and the left and right lenses of the appropriate glasses sort the images out for each eye. Polarized 3D requires a special filter on the projector, and a reflective metallic screen, but its accurate color rendition and the low cost of the glasses make it Hollywood’s choice.

The growing market for 3D television sets is dominated by active shutter technology, which displays left-eye and right-eye images in rapid alternation, instead of simultaneously. Viewers wear battery-powered glasses with liquid-crystal lenses, which receive a timing signal from the TV. The left lens goes black when the screen displays the image for the right eye; then the right lens goes black and the left lens become clear just as the left-eye image appears. In theory, this happens so many times each second that it’s imperceptible.

I recently watched the movie Tron: Legacy, and part of a college football game on ESPN’s 3D channel, on an active shutter television, and it all looked pretty good. However, rapid motion or panning sometimes creates a noticeable out-of-synch flickering effect. And you have to have a very big screen (and sit close to it) to experience truly immersive 3D. The glasses are the most cumbersome part of the system: they cost $100 a pair, are much heavier than polarized or anaglyph glasses and must be recharged periodically.

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