I am not enthused by 3D. I think my disinterest stems from the type of 3D found in theaters. Often using polarization, these techniques first boomed in the 1950s, and obviously haven’t maintained their popularity. My issue is that it never looks truly real. Instead, it looks like a paper pop up book of moving images. The benefit to this, however, is wide angle viewing, provided that everyone has glasses.

Now that 3D is growing in persistence as a sign of our evolved technological achievements, it is getting harder to ignore. There are many 3d televisions for private homes and 3D games, moves, and sporting events to enjoy. For the most part, this is still by polarization. And it is still a pricey endeavor.

Despite my reluctance for 3D, I did by a 3DS. Instead of polarization, it employs stereoscopic 3D. Unlike movie 3D, which attempts to pop out at you, stereoscopic 3D delivers depth of an image to create 3D. Before you see it, you would think that the basic nature of a camera and pictures allow you to understand the dimensions therein, so while you watch something or look at something you can tell the depth of that on screen. The same is true for games, where they take place in a 3D world, and you may not feel that depth will be that different from how you interpret images already.

You would be wrong.

Movie 3D has something definitively unbelievable about it. In reality, when you want to look at any one thing, your eyes bring it to focus, near or far. A standard motion picture dictates what is and is not in focus, which is sensible enough. Designating focus is part of how the movie is directed, and tells you want you should be looking at and when. When this transfers into 3D, it creates a slight problem that I cannot help but notice. You know have things at exaggerated depth, trying to pop out at you, but when the object of focus, such as a person, is moving through the screen, the focus does not accurately adjust itself, so a defined object is moving about in a sea of blurriness, because it’s just a created effect anyways.

Stereoscopic is also a created effect, but since it is projecting to perfectly clear images, you can shift your focus to anything in the screen and it is in focus, which is more logical for 3D than the focus system of 2D. Today I watched the Green Lantern trailer on my 3DS, for the first time seeing a cinema quality film in auto-stereoscopic 3D. It was amazing, even on that small screen. My brain didn’t flag it as suspicious because the effect was more natural. I hope that if 3D has moved truly past revival and is here to stay, technology will allow stereoscopic to take over other methods.