There was not enough content for 3D TVs and people didn’t want to wear special glasses.

Also, consoles were too weak to display 3D content.

They are not impressive, they were extremely expensive, and there was no standard for distributing 3-D movies.

Finally. Everyone got over their craze for three movies and instead I was more interested in 4K.

3dtvs would’ve only had a chance if they were basically gigantic 3ds top screens

The glassesless 3d effect would be the only way. But then you have the issue of the display is then compromised in other ways (rainbowing, contrast issues, softer definition, etc), is more expensive because it’s basically 2 panels laminated together, and is a lot of compromise for something that ultimately had very little content, which was the other issue.

I remember people dragging me to 3d movies and hating it because I’m blind in one eye and having to make the choice between wearing 2 pairs of glasses (other eye isn’t great) or basically sitting through a blurry mess because watching without the glasses was a nightmare (though it varied, sometimes it was 2 small copies of the movie side by side)

Which time? The 90s or the 2010s?

I say it’s a gimmick and doesn’t provide any real benifit.

Not enough content, and some people got sick watching it.

I think it’s because the studios/cable/etc tried to charge extra for 3D content compared to 2D. Ensured that demand for 3D was insufficient to make more content available for it.

Nobody wants to wear dork goggles to watch TV.

I got a 3d tv after seeing fury road 3 times in theaters.

The issue is that 3-d content was, at best, 1080p. That’s 720p per eye. And on a 4k tv it looks low res and shitty.

plus the active lenses remove a lot of the brightness during the opening/closing, so the picture was darker too.

if it was anything close to what it was like with passive glasses in the theater I believe it would have caught on.

You can’t polish a turd and 3d is a turd. So 3D TVs weren’t impressive at all.

They fucking sucked.

I feel like 3D is a different kind of medium. Directors used to shoot movies that look good on a 2D screen weren’t fully utilizing the possibilities of the new medium. However, shooting movies solely for being presented in 3D would not have been financially viable.

VR suffers from a similar problem. But thanks to lower costs, compared to a Hollywood movie, it’s possible to target the smaller market of VR users.

I dislike watching movies in 3D and prefer them in normal 2D.

3d didnt work for some people, made other people sick, required special glasses just to watch, and also required the seating positions and tv to be at certain angles and distances: meaning unless the whole room was changed just for the viewing experience, only a few select people would be able to enjoy the 3d.

Also a dirth of content as making 3d is more difficult.

They needed accessories (polarized glasses or battery powered glasses that alternated frames to produce the 3d effect) to access the 3d features. Also things needs to be produced with 3d in mind or else it just looks like a crappy pop up book. Source: I had one and hated what it did to video games and movies that weren’t intended to be experienced in 3d

Aside from ALL the shit other people have said, 3d always gets used like shit anyway. The way to make it shine is to give depth to images, and everyone wants to use it to make shit “pop out of the screen at you”.

Otherwise it’s subtle. So why bother with the extra infrastructure for no additional effect?

None of my family will watch 3D in theatres. It makes them sick.

This is a huge factor.

A lot of the same issues VR has that relegates it to a very niche hobby, as well as VR itself becoming more of a thing.

Basically, it’s twice the cost at a minimum. Want 3D movies? Well, that’s 2 cameras, double the storage, and all of the added workload in alignment, effects needing to be done for each eye… Basically double everything and add some to stitch them together.

3D games? Same thing, but with calculations. You have to render each eye, plus the calculations to keep them aligned and in the right place.

3D screens? You have to render each eye, so you have to either do glasses or funky screen tech like the 3DS to get that image to each eye at the right time, so the usual minimum is a screen that refreshes twice as fast plus a bit extra with the glasses to tie it all together.

See the pattern? It’s twice as hard, twice as expensive, plus a little extra.

Which begs the question:

Is it twice as good, plus a little extra?

3D has tried to be a thing for well over half a century, and failed every time.

from red/blue disposable glasses to modern headsets, it has always beem a niche for two fundamental reasons:

• The cost to produce content
• The inconvenience to view it

It’s trivial to throw a movie on while you’re folding laundry or cooking. Watching 3D means putting on a device that (currently) prevents you from doing anything else, the Sitting and Watching. And the content is some degree of unwatchable without that.

My family had one at one point growing up. As everyone else has said, there wasn’t much content. There was Avatar and maybe four or five others. The real killer though was the glasses sucked. You didn’t want to sit there for two hours with them on. I preferred 2D but comfortable.

On very good productions, a Hollywood style movie takes produces roughly 1 to 5 minutes a day of content during filming. Not continuous, of course, on average, and not everything that is shot gets released. Think about it, 90 days if shooting to make a two hour film, if preproduction was well made and nothing goes wrong with logistics during production. Then you have post production which is even slower.

Now think that 3D content was at least twice as hard, expensive and complex to film. With even longer and more difficult post production. For content that made half the audience nauseous, and it cost them twice as much.

Digital productions shortened that gap, but it is still way too annoying to actually become more mainstream. Several developments in camera technology promised easier logistics and cheaper production, and more accessible consumer grade products for consumption. But ultimately these gains never materialized and the numbers simply didn’t make sense.

Best 3D movie that wasnt Avatar? Dredd was awesome in 3D.

Most of my family said the active glasses induced headaches.