Academy Award winner Walter Murch says 3D a no go

Academy Award-winning film editor and sound designer Walter Murch writes in a letter to film critic Roger Ebert that 3D will never work. Not because it's expensive, requires uncomfortable glasses, causes headaches, or any other of the usual complaints - but because the evolution of our species has never requiredour eyeballs to focus and converge at different points.

From the Chicago Sun-Times:

The biggest problem with 3D, though, is the "convergence/focus" issue. A couple of the other issues -- darkness and "smallness" -- are at least theoretically solvable. But the deeper problem is that the audience must focus their eyes at the plane of the screen -- say it is 80 feet away. This is constant no matter what.

But their eyes must converge at perhaps 10 feet away, then 60 feet, then 120 feet, and so on, depending on what the illusion is. So 3D films require us to focus at one distance and converge at another. And 600 million years of evolution has never presented this problem before. All living things with eyes have always focussed and converged at the same point.

In a nutshell, our eyeballs make it nearly impossible - without another few million years of HDTV-related evolutionary adaptations - to properly process 3D images.
What do you think about 3D? Will it ever truly catch on?

Via Gizmodo

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