Consider how 3D works... no, not the cameras and projectors, the brain. It is "well known" that the brain detects how far away something is by measuring how much the eyes have to cross for the two images to converge. What seems to be much less well known, though it is obvious with elementary geometry, is that the breaks down as you get further and further away, as the difference in angles becomes smaller and smaller. And it's only a few tens of feet.
Beyond that, you brain uses numerous context clues to assemble a 3D image of the environment; one big one is occlusion, for instance; a thing that is visibly in front of another thing is clearly closer.
3D technology can only really use the eye-difference thing. Conventional 2D technology is already perfectly good at all the other clues. (Try playing a 3D game sometime and simply trying to see it in 3D; you may find that it's perfectly possible and merely a perspective shift much like seeing the vase or the face in the classical optical illusion.) Consequently, you end up with an effect where everything is either taking place on a very small stage in front of you, or still stuck to the background in totally normal 2D. In the worst case, the background is a visible plane, like a skybox.
There is no way around this limitation. It's fundamental.
A space fight, which sounds like it would be awesome in 3D, is actually fundamentally a 2D thing, when it comes to projection technology. If any bit of the space fight is within you 3D-binocular-vision range, you're probably already dead. It may look awesome, but simultaneously, it is going to look like a toy, intrinsically, because if it is in 3D, it is equally obviously a space fight between two spaceship toys taking place about twenty feet in front of you.
I'm not saying there's no place for 3D, but I'm not exactly holding my breath. Someday, I suspect we'll look back on this series of 3D movies as slightly more sophisticated than the ones from decades past, but only slightly, committing all sorts of "blindingly obvious" scale errors and other such things.
Consider how 3D works... no, not the cameras and projectors, the brain. It is "well known" that the brain detects how far away something is by measuring how much the eyes have to cross for the two images to converge. What seems to be much less well known, though it is obvious with elementary geometry, is that the breaks down as you get further and further away, as the difference in angles becomes smaller and smaller. And it's only a few tens of feet.
Beyond that, you brain uses numerous context clues to assemble a 3D image of the environment; one big one is occlusion, for instance; a thing that is visibly in front of another thing is clearly closer.
3D technology can only really use the eye-difference thing. Conventional 2D technology is already perfectly good at all the other clues. (Try playing a 3D game sometime and simply trying to see it in 3D; you may find that it's perfectly possible and merely a perspective shift much like seeing the vase or the face in the classical optical illusion.) Consequently, you end up with an effect where everything is either taking place on a very small stage in front of you, or still stuck to the background in totally normal 2D. In the worst case, the background is a visible plane, like a skybox.
There is no way around this limitation. It's fundamental.
A space fight, which sounds like it would be awesome in 3D, is actually fundamentally a 2D thing, when it comes to projection technology. If any bit of the space fight is within you 3D-binocular-vision range, you're probably already dead. It may look awesome, but simultaneously, it is going to look like a toy, intrinsically, because if it is in 3D, it is equally obviously a space fight between two spaceship toys taking place about twenty feet in front of you.
I'm not saying there's no place for 3D, but I'm not exactly holding my breath. Someday, I suspect we'll look back on this series of 3D movies as slightly more sophisticated than the ones from decades past, but only slightly, committing all sorts of "blindingly obvious" scale errors and other such things.