There were always advantages of viewing a film at the cinema: You can see it in wide screen, in complete surround sound and in 3D (if available). Pretty much like in your living room then? Viewing the same film at home on a top-of-the-line home cinema set-up can rival a theatre experience; you can watch a film on blu-ray on an HD screen, in the correct aspect ratio, in 7.1 surround and also in 3D.
With every advance the cinema has taken, the home cinema has soon caught up. Although I will admit that regardless the size of your television, it still doesn't beat actually going to the cinema. A real cinema experience (particularly one utilising actual film projection) has always been preferential to spending a night in front of your TV.
This is why I'm slightly saddened to report that this will no long be the case. ...in the near future.
Yes, this soothsaying genius has predicted the collapse of film industry funding. Ever rising tickets prices and an increasingly better quality of home cinema will cause more and more cinema to close in the future. The film industry won't die though thanks to blu-ray and film download sales, and the video games market. (more on this later).
The clear advantage of a cinema experience over watching a film in your living room was you can see it in 3D. Well now you can do so at home, but there's still the problem that you have to wear 3D glasses to do so. This will always be the case in the cinema, but at home there are a couple of technologies for 3D television that have not yet been mass marketed to the masses. If I were cynical I would suggest that this is because the folks in the industry don't want the 3D home experience to be better than that of the cinema. Lenticular, glasses-free TVs have already been produced, some to greater success than others. I personally am holding off buying a 3DTV for the day when the 3D technology is perfected enough to warrant the extortionate price I'll inevitably have to pay. ...And that day's not far off. The 3DTV industry has to move as one though; we can't have a variety of different technologies out there... (technically we can, but why waste all that extra bandwidth and conversion technology).
There is one obvious aspect of looking at an object in real life that differs from that of a 3D object on a screen, and that is focal point. I talking about creating movies more interactive (and this is where the crossover into video games territory comes in).
In real life you look round a room and your eyes focus on something. Look at something in the foreground and then something in the background. You can bring both into focus, but you can't focus on both at once. Ever since Orson Welles popularised the effect of deep focus in Citizen Kane, films have looked amazing artistically, but less realistic compared to how we see things in real life. Wouldn't it be marvellous to view a 3D film in which your focal length changes depending on which depth you're looking at? Well I've designed just such a device to do that. It won't change the way we view films in general, but it will make the 3d home cinema experience a lot more immersive and therefore more realistic. The same technology could however completely revolutionise the games industry.
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| Orson Welles, showing off in sharp focus in the background. (Citizen Kane, 1941) |
