I believe it’s very important to start distinguishing the differences between automated and manual 2d-to-3d conversion, such as we provide, and stop generalizing this subject.
About 15% (a little less or more) of human population have troubles watching stereo 3D, of course conversion is one of the factors in these, but I think partly this is also a matter of time and getting used to. On the other hand, in my personal opinion it’s also a result inherent to the STEREO technology, which gives some unnatural effect, wheter the content is OK or not, and which is not possible to solve. What I refer to is the effect that your brain expect the point of view to change when you move your head left/right, and this just doens’t happen in stereo: everything moves with you, as it is still the same content. So, there’s a great advantage in using autostereoscopic, like our xyZ 3D Displays, from this point of view.
Back to the 2d-to-3d conversion: In my opinion you cannot simply say that 2d-to-3d conversion is a recipe for headaches, actually I think careful handmade conversions will not cause any more headache than proper filmed stereo content. The main difference between will be more that the immersive effect will be less. HOWEVER when talking about automated 2d-3d conversion I do agree, ALL automated conversion demos I have seen sofar have a lot of errors and are indeed headache improving bacause a lot of depth doesn’t make sense and especially when left and right view become very messed up.
Also I need to say something regarding some other recent debates about the converted Clash Of The Titans featured film. SOME people said it was very bad and it supposed to be ‘destructive’ for the original, but for a project done in ~8 weeks it wasn’t bad at all. Obviously it did miss some immersive 3D effect, but I think this is mainly caused by the fact that the film wasn’t produced fully in the knowledge that it would be converted later on. However, it was still very entertaining to watch and worth the few extra euros/dollars for me, and THAT’’s what it’s about. Meanwhile the films’ revenues are more than USD 454M, with a production budget of ‘only’ USD 125M.
Kind regards,
Jean-Pierre van Maasakker