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Comment by hiou | Hacker News Reader

Not to mention that this has to be one of the corniest things I've seen since the 90s. From a tech side it's interesting, but from an end user side it's something I would make fun of with my friends. I wonder how much of that is some kind of uncanny valley esque problem. I laughed out loud with I saw the screen shot.

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Have you actually tried a VR theater application yet? Even on my DK1 over a year ago, the experience[1] was pretty compelling. Add in resolution improvements and the fact that you can render stereo 3D with perfect fidelity (no hacky glasses in the equation) and it gets even better.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhdSozujoRc (video not mine)

Very true. The key word is "compelling". Once you try a few VR devices, even low end ones like a decent phone and a Google cardboard, you can definitely sense the possible seed of something game changing here. Maybe VR will work out, maybe it won't - but that alone I think makes it worth exploring.

People don't quite get it until they've tried it. The most surprising thing is the way that the 3D stereoscopy of the environment combined with the head tracking in VR conveys scale. The movie theater actually looks AS BIG AS A MOVIE THEATER SCREEN. It's not "strap this thing on your face and get kind of an illusion of a 3D movie floating in front of you", it's "Strap this thing on your face and see a massive screen in front of you that couldn't physically fit in the room you're currently sitting in". Not to mention that you'll ideally get virtual theater surround through headphones that is fixed in space, such that turning your head keeps the sounds coming from their respective speaker positions relative to your head rather than staying the same.

As for 3D stereoscopy in movies; that's an inherently limited format (it's limited because of the fixed viewer viewpoint and the edges of the screen). 3D stereo and VR are not comparable by any means. About the only thing that they have in common is that you use two eyes to view them. Here though, the VR cinema adds an advantage - 3D stereoscopic content can be shown perfectly without any cross-talk between images, which helps with the integrity of the effect. Note effect. IMHO 3D on a fixed movie screen is strictly a special effect. When used in such a way, it's great. When overused or used improperly, it sucks.

TL;DR: '3D movies' and VR shouldn't be uttered in the same sentence.

One can get a preview of the 3D without 3D glasses or a VR headset by zooming out and looking through the screen like it's a random dot stereogram (or "magic eye" picture).

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