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.
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