4 Reasons the 3D TV Movement is Already Dead

4

3D Is Terrible on the Eyes (Particularly 3D TV)

There was never a time in human history when 3D didn't feel like getting your eyes punched by a swarm of hateful invisible pixies. When the technology was first being developed for the home market, companies found that 1 in 4 viewers was experiencing everything from eye strain to headaches to an expressed desire to vomit.

It doesn't take a doctorate in statistics to realize that a product that makes 25 percent of its users painfully ill isn't going to be something that people will gravitate toward, especially not for five hours a day, which is the average amount of time people spend watching television.

Bruce Bennett / Getty
Glasses-free 3D is much more convenient, so long as "convenient" means "you have to stand in one very specific place or it doesn't work."

3

Most People Who Bought a 3D TV Didn't Actually Use the 3D

Despite the rise in 3D TV sales in 2012, only 115,000 American homes were actually using them to watch 3D stations, which is a number so small that it doesn't even register as a measurable data sample for Nielsen ratings. More people bought Paris Hilton's CD than watched a 3D broadcast.

2

3D Makes Gaming Worse

When you take into account that they're a) bad for children, b) irritating on eyes, and c) distracting to wear, it's kind of no wonder that people didn't want a pair of cumbersome sunglasses stuck to their faces while they were trying to make sniper shots in Call of Duty. Anything that gets between us and the screen is one more variable that we'd rather do away with, especially when a pair of glasses costs as much as a brand-new game and actually lowers the resolution and frame rate of what we're playing.

And it's not as if the game companies didn't know this. Back when PlayStation unveiled a $500 3D display, they weren't doing it because they thought it was the cutting edge of the industry -- Sony's electronic branch required PlayStation to integrate 3D technology in order to stimulate sales.

Kiyoshi Ota / Stringer / Getty
If you force someone else to do a half-assed job of building it, they will come.

1

There Was Simply Never a Demand for the Technology, Ever

Believe it or not, the first commercial 3D movie premiered in the 1920s, played once, and quickly dropped off the face of the Earth. Since then, Hollywood has attempted to bring it back every few decades, first in the '50s and then in the '70s.

Ironic Research
Immediately after this picture was taken, everyone here died of typhus.

And it failed both times. Why? Because 3D simply doesn't make anything better. People in the 1950s were getting the same goddamned headaches we get today. Asking consumers to pay more for a feature that makes them sick is a terrible business model for pretty much any industry. And yet 3D keeps coming back, and we have people like the CEO of DreamWorks Animation calling it the "greatest innovation that's happened for the movie theaters and for moviegoers since color," despite the fact that the technology is actually older than color film.

And so, in 2010, when a worldwide Nielsen poll said less than 10 percent of people were willing to buy a 3D TV the following year, Disney took that as a sign to create a sports network specifically for 3D viewing in 2011, which is the same network that just called it quits because nobody was watching it. You didn't need 3D glasses to see that one coming, fellas.