So, I have to beat the dead horse on the 3-D glasses again. Reports suggest that this was the most-watched Super Bowl ever, with 98.5 million viewers. I even watched a few of the plays as I zoomed through to catch all 35 of the commercials. I donned the 3-D glasses that Intel and DreamWorks gave out for the trailer of animated film Monsters vs. Aliens, and the subsequent 3-D ad for SoBe soft drinks.
The quality was abysmal. This demonstration actually did a disservice to good 3-D glasses imagery. It’s possible, given what you can do with special glasses, special TV sets, and even good experiences in theaters. But the DreamWorks clip didn’t really make use of its 3-D, except when the guy was bouncing a ball on a string directly at the TV screen. The images were dark when viewed through the glasses, they were blurry, and, for the most part, I couldn’t even tell that the images were supposed to be in 3-D. This was especially true of the SoBe commercial.
I predicted it was going to be lousy, and I wasn’t the only one who agreed, as this story in AdWeek suggests. Intel had 125 million 3-D glasses made to show off its InTru technology that debuts with the release of the film next month.
If you’re going to promote high-quality 3-D in the theaters, you shouldn’t turn people off to the idea by showing them lousy 3-D on their unflattering TVs. And as I’m finding, it’s just too easy to make fun of 3-D glasses with references to 1950s fads alone. Maybe I’m still the party pooper on this one, but I’d really love to see high-quality 3-D become a reality. Until then, all these fledgling efforts just set the cause back.