This week, I saw my first 3D movie. For a while, I’ve been curious about how the whole 3D media experience is going mainstream. At the consumer electronics show in January, 3D TV was all the rage. In the past two years, 3D has been coming to movie theaters.
Up until this week when I saw “Alice in Wonderland,” my 3D experience was limited to 10-minute theme park shows like the “Muppets 3D” in Disney’s MGM/Disney Studios park and “Honey I Shrunk the Audience” in Epcot Center.
Needless to say, the 3D in theaters today is far superior to the 90s technology in the Florida theme parks. The question has been burning in my mind: Will 3D become the norm for visual media?
When color television first arrived on the market, many people didn’t want to pay for the new color TVs and rationalized that they didn’t need to be shown what colors a baseball field was. Eventually, however, the price for color technology declined, and color television became the norm. Movies like the “Wizard of Oz” hinged on the color aspect. Think about how much more powerful and enjoyable that movie is in color versus what it would have been in only black and white.
I think we’ll see the same predictors for the future of 3D:
- Affordability – Right now it is much more expensive to watch a movie in 3D. Like all technology, however, those prices will decline.
- Dependability – By this term, I mean how much media content depends on the 3D feature. What will be the “Wizard of Oz” of 3D? Will directors and producers figure out how to make movies and television shows use 3D in a way that transcends the “cheap 3D tricks” we see today? Movies and TV need to depends on the 3D features
- Development of a norm - There’s a catch-22 here. The first two points depend on 3D becoming widely accepted not just as a fad, but as a norm. Consequently, the norming of 3D depends on affordability and dependability.
Where will we see 3D develop into a necessary feature? Horror movies and thrillers? Sports? Fantasy?
Perhaps we’ll just have to take the plunge down the 3D rabbit hole to see what happens next.
