From: Michael Wiik (mwiik@messagenet.com)
Date: Wed Jul 31 2002 - 11:16:33 MDT
"Avatar Polymorph" <avatarpolymorph@hotmail.com> wrote:
> Future Shock is just not hitting people. They will see digital movies with
> VR-like special effects.
I think Distress (as from the Egan novel) is a bigger problem than
Future Shock. I first noticed this when taping 'Cleopatra' off
television for later viewing, many years ago.
I had recently purchased a VHS unit, to replace a Beta unit which had
fried. On the Beta I was used to recording at the slowest speed. The
resulting video seemed fine. So when I got VHS and tried to record
'Cleopatra', I set it at the slowest speed so as to get the whole long
epic movie onto one tape. It was unwatchable. Not blurry, so much, as
just 'missing' something that made it hard to follow. (Since then, VHS
has gotten much better in quality terms).
I had a similar feeling when watching the second-to-last Star Wars movie
(Episode 1). I didn't see it in the theater, just on television. I
thought it annoying that it never focused for more than a fraction of a
second or so on most exterior shots.
I'm not alone in this:
<<Digital images contain less information than 35mm film images, and the
more you test their limits, the more you see that. Two weeks ago I saw
"Patton" shown in 70mm Dimension 150, and it was the most astonishing
projection I had ever seen--absolute detail on a giant screen, which was
6,000 times larger than a frame of the 70mm film. That's what
large-format film can do, but it's a standard Hollywood has abandoned>>
--Roger Ebert, reviewing Attack of the Clones
see http://messagenet.com/fw/f1163.html
It's like Id's FPS games, from Wolfenstein 3D to Doom to Quake II. W3D
was blocky, somewhat nightmarish. Doom was better, less 'scary' in a
visual sense than W3D (and I don't mean the game universe was less
frightening, I meant the dreams that resulted: dreaming of answering the
knock on the door and finding a nazi guard who's face is like a dozen
pixels). When I got Quake II I also got my first 3D card, and thought,
wow! this is much better than software rendering, but found it
disturbing that as I approached objects, they got *blurry*. Things
aren't supposed to get blurry when you get close to them. It's not the
way the world works. Better visually perhaps, and ignorable, but at
least the predecessor games still had definite 'limits', in that you
knew where one pixel started and the next began. I'm wondering what the
idea that things should get blurry when you get close to them is doing
to my brain.
As we get more and more saturated with digital movies (especially as
most theaters are not equipped to show them and show film prints
instead), and VR, we're losing more and more visual information. Until
digital imaging gets as information-rich as real film (like 'Patton'
above), it seems to me we'll be in an 'Uncanny Valley'.
Like Greta van Sustern on FOX news. Imho, the facelift was not an
improvement. Before (on CNN), her face had a certain *character*. Now
that character is still there, easily spottable if you saw her
pre-facelift, but somewhat disturbing in the context of her new face.
Sort of a living 'Uncanny Valley'.
Thanks,
-Mike
--
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