No, not Hollywood this time. YOU.
There's a reason why so many people look at 3D as being a "gimmick" or nothing more than a sales ploy to sell more (or simply more expensive) movie tickets. It's because a lot of Hollywood does things for effect.. making the 3D "pop" and having things come flying out of the screen at you and so forth. Stupid shit.
What we need to do, as users capable of creating our own 3D content (particularly games), is to show them that it shouldn't be done this way. The problem is, we're not helping. If anything, we're making it worse.
I just got recently purchased a 3D monitor for my computer, and I've been taking the opportunity to see a bunch of 3D content on the internet, such as YouTube and the like (as well as, naturally, trying out every PC game I have). I see a lot of game footage online; gameplay, demos, etc. And on practically every video I see, it's small wonder people say that 3D is too much.. you people have no idea what you're doing with it.
On practically every gameplay video I've seen on YouTube, the person recording it has the 3D depth effect cranked up far beyond the "gimmick" stage into the "I have to cross my eyes to see anything" stage. And they call it "immersive". There's a slider in the NVidia control panel that defaults to 15%. I can tell most of the people out there have it set to somewhere around.. oh.. 100% or so.
Let me give a quick rundown of how 3D works for those that are unfamiliar. The computer renders everything in the scene twice, at different levels of separation. One copy goes to our left eye, one to our right. The further apart they are. Because of the way our eyes focus on things, the further apart the objects are, the further away they appear to be (or are closer to us, popping out of the screen, depending on how the effect is rendered).
The problem when you turn the effect up too high is that objects are too far apart to be able to focus on them. Let's say you have a character on screen, and a tree in the distance. The player character is fairly close to the screen, so the separation isn't that high. On a 23" computer monitor, we're looking at a separation between left and right eye of maybe a quarter of an inch. At a normal distance of around 40" or so, that's not hard for our eyes to focus on. If you look at the screen without your 3D glasses on, the character looks blurry and "doubled".
The tree in the distance, on the other hand, may be three or four inches apart.. without glasses, you can actually see two separate, distinct trees. Because of how far apart they are, your eyes have to pull away from each other in order to see it properly. For most people, our eyes don't actually work that way, and it becomes an effort, and in some cases painful, to actually focus on objects like that. Crossing our eyes toward each other is easier to do, but that only happens on objects that are "closer" to us rather than further away.
The 3D effect is meant to draw you into the experience. Having to contort your eyeballs to see something does exactly the opposite of that, it pulls you out of the experience and reminds you that you're playing a game. And a poorly-calibrated one at that.
The other thing it does, that most people don't stop and think about, is that it will destroy the effect of scale. By having to move your eyes as much as you do to focus on things, it makes it look like the game world is just a small diorama, and you're looking at it through a tiny little camera.
It took me only a matter of minutes of fiddling with 3D to figure out that the effect worked best when it was subtle. Keep the depth to a fairly low setting, so that even the objects far in the distance still have a fairly low separation value, maybe half an inch. What you end up with is a much more immersive feeling, because you're eyes aren't having to fight against themselves in order to focus on anything. Just like in real life! How 'bout that. Your eyes don't hurt focusing on things when you walk your dog, why should they do it when you're raiding the Firelands or killing aliens?
After a few minutes of playing like this, you'll quickly forget that you're playing in 3D. And this is a good thing. You're focusing on the game again, and not the gimmick. But that gameplay will feel deeper to you.. you'll feel a lot more like you're really there. True immersion happens by accident, and not because you're forced into it. The 3D effect should never "wow" you, it should only serve to pull you deeper into the experience.
Some of Hollywood understands this. If you want to see a gimmick-free, proper use of 3D, go see Prometheus. I'll have a full review up later, but I can tell you that this is some of the best use of 3D that I've ever seen, right up there with Avatar for pulling you into the world. And most of the time, you don't even notice it.
So gamers.. turn your 3D down, for Pete's sake. Then those videos you upload to YouTube won't make people eyes try to rip themselves out of their head. Show the rest of them how it's done. Resist the temptation to turn your game into a gimmick, and go subtle. You'll be glad for it in the end.
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