I have mixed feelings about 3D movies.
I'm just old enough to remember both the cheap paper 3D glasses and more modern plastic 3D glasses. I got in on the early days of the 3D resurgence in the 80s. The latest and greatest.
Except it wasn't great, at least not to me. It never quite worked as intended. Most of the time, my glasses simply didn't work. When the glasses did work, the 3D effects were mildly nauseating - uncomfortable rather than thrilling - and the movie was often too dark. It was a lot of hassle for a dubious payoff.
Headaches and physical discomfort seem like the most common complaint. While I can't personally identify with that, I will accept that it is real for the large number of people who experience it. And the discomfort may be a result of seeing something that (I've been told) is not at all like we see things in real life. At best, it's an approximation done with technological trickery that fools our brain. I've never been sure that's true. The biological mechanisms seem quite the same to my layman's understanding. Once the 2D image is presented to each eye slightly differently, it seems like the body should work through it the way it does without special glasses. It would seem I'm probably wrong, however.
In response to "the latest and greatest of the 80's," I'm not sure why we should assume there was anything better about 3D in the 80's. The concept is pretty much the same as it was in the 50's, at least when it incorporated polarized lenses, the same thing used in the theaters today. Home 3D sometimes uses the same passive polarized lens technology, although mostly at home it's done with active shutter glasses, but both are just methods of allowing each eye to see a slightly different image.
I also remember the old 3D comic books, which were great fun, but primitive compared to films, but the concept was the same by shutting off differing qualities to each eye, while allowing in other qualities.
I studied those comics with the naked eye, and realized that depth was created by the amount of separation between superimposed images, one in blue, and the other in red (This was the 50's. I don't know if the 80's comics did the same thing). I was actually able to draw crude superimposed images in red and blue, look at them with red/green paper glasses and see differences in depth.
In the Forest Service we used to look at aerial photographs. We had special tools that looked at two photos that overlapped as the plane would make repeated passes, shifting it's flight pattern to the side. We could actually see the terrain in 3d (God knows why we did this. I could see no reason to look at the photos in 3D, but I guess somebody thought it was helpful, although I didn't know any foresters that bothered with the extra photos either).
One guy showed me how you could hold two photos close together and look at them with the naked eye and see the 3D. It was incredibly hard, like looking at those posters that were the fad in the 70s and 80s. But I could get it to work after wasting a lot of time.
In 2012 or so, there was a wave of public displeasure with 3D movies. I'd see lots of articles claiming 3D was dying. Has it actually died? I see articles claiming that it has declined to about 20% of ticket sales. I've noticed that 3D movies are far less common than during the early 2010s bonanza, but they're not gone completely.
I don't know what to make of those articles. They do attempt to explain the drop off in interest. Whether they correctly know why, I'm not sure. The light issues can be corrected with brighter projectors. The headaches not so much. And if people aren't going to pay the premium admission, that's not going to change.
My personal opinion is that one of the failures is that Hollywood expects people to want to see a regular movie presented in 3D. My two favorites, Avatar and Dr. Strange were willing to go the extra mile and build the imagery to the technology, rather than just shoot a movie in 3D. This is what makes all the difference in the world to me. You have a good technology, but you have to build TO it.. the way a programmer writes programs for the computer, rather than just expect the computer to present something special with the "garbage in" side of the equation.
And since virtual reality headsets are the next big thing, the public seems to have an unquenchable thirst for the sensation of 3D. Who knows, maybe 3D movies might make a comeback with a new, more effective and less uncomfortable technique.
I'm interested in VR too, although it's even more problematic than 3D glasses. It's a rush to view things through the headset, but it's very awkward. And the guys that demonstrated it to me warned that some people suffer physically, like getting falling down dizzy. That seems like a bigger problem than nausea and a headache, so I'm not in a rush to go that route until I see what the next generation of the technology is like.
