Why do 3D films suck? Or do they?

Interesting post in the comments at the Sun Times about why 3D films seem to be worse than 2D ones. I think I agree with all of that, but now that I've thought about it a bit more, I think his conclusion is wrong. If you have not read the link above, go do so now. I'll wait.

There has been work about making glasses that can re-focus dynamically. One of the designs has each lens made of a pair of thin sheets of plastic with something like mineral oil in between them. The glasses can be focused by pumping oil in or out of the space between the plastic sheets, causing the lens to form more convex or more concave shapes.

For movie theaters there's not much that could be done for their $0.25 per pair price point, but for home cinema where the glasses are already $50.00 or whatever, it would be able to provide a nicer, headache-free viewing experience.

My own theory about why 3D films are hard to watch is that they are shot with too little depth of field. In 2D the only way to separate the foreground object from the background is to use a large aperature so that the background objects are out of focus. When I'm trying to see an object in 3D, however, the fact that much of the frame is badly out of focus makes my eyes have to work extra hard to make sense of what is going on. Otherwise I end up seeing a relatively clear subject floating in a cloud of colored fog.

I'd like to see a 3D film shot with very small aperatures—ones small enough that only things far away from the subject are visibly out of focus, and even then not huge and blurry as is typical of a 2D film. I might still hate it, but then maybe it would at least be better. And with 3D giving the appearance of not going away any time soon, maybe that is the best we can hope for.

Why do Facebook apps tend to be crummy?

A few years ago when Facebook announced their app api, I didn't look too closely at it but I rather assumed that it would take a few months and there would be a bunch of nasty little apps available along with a few good ones. It does not seem to me that this has happened. Instead there were lots of nasty little games, and a few every-so-slightly-less-nasty ones.

Why is this?

My theory is that it is because Facebook treats these apps as distinctly second class citizens. Facebook themselves only wants a lot of users and a lot of pageviews. Anything else is optional. Their money comes from advertising, so they want lots of that. Apps are going to be helping to drive some of the advertising, but ads on those app pages are going to be less valuable. If I'm paying for the privilege of playing some little game, I'm less likely to be looking around the page for other fancy things to click on. Things which will take my attention away from the little game I just paid for.

Instead, if Facebook acted like they wanted to be the next global computing platform then these little applications would be easier to build than a typical web site, they would be easier to monitize, and as a result they would be of higher quality. Amazon and Google both share revenue when you do things that help them. I don't know how big that is at Amazon right now, but at one time it was huge. At Google it is a significant portion of their business model. Facebook puts ads on ever page (or at least seems to). They could easily track how many impressions each app delivered, and split the ad revenue for those impressions with the app author.

What would that do for Facebook? They'd be giving away money! But I think they would encourage the production of higher quality apps (as well as a veritable ton of lower quality ones) that are not big enough to warrant their own billing.

There was talk of Facebook being the next big computing platform. I don't see this happening. iOS and Android seem to be the next big computing platforms. I think that the fact that it is obvious how to make money selling an iPhone app accounts for part of that.

Michael Caine is cool

See for yourself.

It's alive!

Just now I decided to write a new post here every night.

Let's see how long this lasts.

Anyhow, I just finished making garlic sauce. It's pretty delicious. I minced an entire garlic, then cooked it until it was light brown and crispy in butter and olive oil. The plan is to take it to Red Robin tomorrow night and eat it on the french fries.

Why?

Well, Red Robin has some of the best fries around, and garlic fries are (as everybody knows) the best kind of fries, so my daughter came up with the idea to make Red Robin garlic fries. She's been wanting to do this for nearly a year now. It looks like tomorrow is going to be her night.

I'm hoping for good things here.