Is stereoscopic even worth it?

"steve" wrote:
The cameras are a fixed distance apart, like an IPD. When the cameras are a different distance apart, viewing the movie is like watching something at the wrong IPD.

When IPD is so important, how can stereoscopic be seriously proposed as an option? Isn't this like saying "enter some wildly random number for your IPD, and use it for hours"?

I can't watch stereoscopic movies except as a small rectangle in the distance to minimise the 3D effect, which is pointless.

The problem gets _far_ worse for attempted stereoscopic 360 degree movies, so I won't even go into that.

Watching a 3D movie (or even playing a game on a 3D monitor) is quite a bit different than experiencing something in VR. You have the ability to see the world around you at all times when watching something in 3D on a screen. There's no motion-tracking lag, and there's always the real-world as reference. For most people, those factors are enough that the baked-in IPD isn't a problem. DK1 was almost unusable for me due to the rapid buildup of nausea, but with nVidia 3D Vision, I can play games with any 3D setting my eyes can comfortably converge on. I can play games with either realistic scale, or set so that all the characters seem to be the size of action figures. In cases like that, the effective IPD is way out of line with my actual IPD, but it's simply not a problem for me. Latency, persistence, and head-tracking ended up being much more important for me--so much so that the difference between DK1 and DK2 is night and day for me.

So ultimately, everyone is different. Your problems with IPD aren't representative of the population as a whole. Otherwise, 3D of any form would have been an utter flop, since nobody would pay upwards of $20 for the two-hour barfbag experience.