This is a bit long, but kinda fun. (At least I think so!)
I bet most of us here are old enough to remember going to see "3D movies" in theaters when we were young back in the 1950s.
We would pay our way into the theater at the ticket booth, and then be given both our ticket and a cheap cardboard eyeglasses thing with a red lens and a blue lens.
Then on to the inside of the theater, where we would plop ourselves down into a seat, put on the 3D glasses, and sit back and enjoy the marvels of modern motion picture technology, 3D style.
Watching Godzilla seeming to leap off the screen at us, as audience members gasped and/or screamed!
And those 3D films of the early-to-mid 1950's were largely successful and profitable, so I learned, but they failed to "catch on," and become a mainstay of regular movie-going over the succeeding decades.
Some primary reasons for this were, so I read, first, as one might suspect, the clumsiness of having to wear the special glasses (including the theater's logistics of having to acquire and hand out the glasses); also, technical reasons (from a website: " ... the biggest drawback to the process may have been the fact that it required two prints running simultaneously through two projectors. Lose a frame on one print, and your movie was no longer synchronized)"; competition with Cinemascope, which was a big new fad coming out at the time; and the lingering feeling among many film executives that 3D was just a "gimmick," and would never become a serious, mainstream cinema option.
But 3D theater films continued and continue to pop up now and then, and there have even been some attempts to create 3D televisions (which have largely failed, because, in the words of one website: "lack of content, high costs, and poor quality").
But what about
those Internet websites running now which claim to offer 3D imagery in their visuals? Just how realistic is it, what those sites are claiming to be 3D?
Well, to get an idea of the state-of-the-art in this area, I surveyed some sites claiming to be just that, "3D," by googling "3 d websites" and then checking out a few of them.
I did this while bearing in mind, of course, that few if any websearchers nowadays are ever going to be equipped with any kind of 3D-glasses, and if a site is really 3D as it claims, the searchers will just have to see it by looking at their monitor screens, with no glasses in hand.
But first of all, how do website designers even try to simulate 3D visuals on websites, without relying on the viewers to have 3D glasses?
Well, I asked Microsoft Bing AI
how do websites make images look three dimensionaland got this answer, almost all of which is technical and way over my head:
"Creating a three-dimensional (3D) effect on websites involves various techniques and tools. Let’s explore how web designers achieve this captivating visual experience:
Parallax Scrolling: By offsetting the speed at which elements scroll, designers create an illusion of depth. As users scroll down a page, foreground and background elements move at different rates, simulating a 3D effect.
Animated Visuals: Animations, transitions, and transformations can add dimensionality. For instance, rotating objects, zooming in/out, or animating elements as users interact with them can create a sense of depth.
Skeuomorphism: This design approach mimics real-world objects. By incorporating textures, shadows, and gradients, designers make elements appear tangible and 3D. Think of buttons that look like physical buttons or bookshelf-style navigation.
Faux Dimensional Scrolling: Instead of a flat scroll, designers manipulate the scroll behavior to create depth. For example, as users scroll, elements might tilt or shift slightly, enhancing the 3D illusion.
Glassmorphism: A trendy design style that combines transparency, blur, and frosted glass-like effects. It gives elements a sense of depth and makes them appear as if they’re floating above the background.
Tools and Resources:
Modeling Software Apps:
AutoCAD: Used for precise 3D modeling.
Blender: A powerful open-source 3D creation suite.
SketchUp: Great for architectural and product design.
Vectary: A user-friendly online 3D design tool.
Modeling Libraries:
cgTrader, SketchFab, 3DExport, and Vue.js: These libraries provide 3D models and assets.
No-Code Tools:
Platforms like Vev allow designers to create 3D web designs without coding.
You can upload your own .glb files to build 3D experiences directly within Vev.
Remember, 3D elements don’t have to dominate the entire website. Use them selectively to enhance specific parts of your design and create a memorable user experience."Again, more than I really wanted to know, and well over my head.
But a constant here would seem to be attempting to simulate 3D on websites by employing glasses-free techniques, to the degree that this is possible.
So do the above-described techniques really work? Do websites where they are used actually show realistic 3D visuals?
To find out I sampled a number of sites which I had called up, by googling
3 d websites examples Then, after looking at a few of them, my own conclusion was that, to be of the caliber of movie theater 3D, which we'll call our "standard," Internet "3D websites" have some work to do.
Personally, I would say that of the handful of "3D websites" I did look at, maybe 80 % of the visuals I saw frankly weren't all that impressive. As if they had tried to create a 3D effect, but didn't quite make it.
As for the other 20%, they "kinda" had some success at creating a good 3D effect, I thought, but nothing like a "standard" 3D theater movie could do.
But I did find one example (noted below) that really did seem to come close to movie theater quality 3D.
In other words, nothing really "jumped off the screen at me" (good way to put it, right?).
Here are a few of the 3D sites I looked at that did seem to me to have made some of the better attempts at 3D visuals, although, again, there's a lot of room for improvement:
See what you think:
https://99designs.com/inspiration/websites/3dhttps://graphicmama.com/blog/3d-website-examples/https://blog.hubspot.com/website/3d-websitesAnd after viewing the examples on the above sites, I award first prize to this one (from the first link above) :
https://99designs.com/profiles/arthean/designs/1884705 One might say that the holy grail of successful Internet 3D display is going to be (1) achieving movie theater quality 3D online, with (2) no mechanical assistance devices, like 3D glasses, needed.
Perhaps that will be achieved someday.
But in the meantime it would seem entirely possible, if there comes to be an interest in doing it, to create even right now a large 3D website presence on the web, just by following a couple of steps:
1. adopt an Internet-wide technical standard for achieving website 3D display capability, to include use of existing 3D red-and-blue paper glasses, for viewing 3D on one's own computers, both workplace and device .
2. distribute these glasses far and wide: people would then keep a pair next to their home workstation monitors, ready for use when accessing a 3D website; and a pair in their shirt pockets, for use in shopping malls, etc., when accessing their devices in such places.
Yes, presumably something like this could be done right now. Computer visuals in websites could be programed to appear fuzzy and distorted when first popping up on screen, but then seen in 3D when the viewer puts on the glasses and looks again at the screen.
Or, maybe 3D websites could work like this. A site pops up on screen in current form, with its visuals in 2D format. But at the top of the homepage is a button with caption: click here for 3D. And clicking on it instantly changes all visuals in the site to 3D format, now viewable with the glasses. And then, if one prefers, clicking the button again changes everything back to 2D.
Something like this should be doable right now, if enough people were to want it. That is, if the demand were to be there.
But what about
that other thing, the mention in this thread's title, that 3D websites could "assist in medical training?"
Okay, imagine the following scene. A large auditorium in a medical school somewhere filled with med students, all about
to watch a surgery training film on a large jumbo screen on the front wall of the room. The instructor, high up in a projection room behind the students, says "put on your glasses," and each student dons red-blue paper 3d glasses and looks at the screen. The instructor then pushes a button and, instantly, a video of a surgery in progress, it could even be a prostatectomy, flashes on the screen
with organs appearing to the students in 3D, as they would to a surgeon performing an actual surgery in real life!.Wouldn't it seem that such a training video would be more effective than the current, usually 2D videos?
If the following actual TURP in progress could be "3D-ized," wouldn't that serve as a better training video than the "flat" 2D one seen here?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn0bo3gm4_wOf course "animated" surgery training videos (color drawings of anatomy in motion, like cartoons) have been out there for a good while. But making and using ones of actual surgeries, in 3D movie theater style, could offer, would it not seem, a whole new perspective.
Or perhaps it's already been tried, and was not pursued because of technical problems, or a lack of interest, or lack of funding to implement it.
There are a number of evaluative articles out there discussing the state-of-the- art of 3D medical training animation, such as this one:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s2352013223000625which
opens, BTW, with the sentence
"The use of 3D video in medical education has not been fully explored."but does maintain
"Most students’ experience of 3D video in medical education was positive."And specifically,
"All students were satisfied with 3D video; the students’ score for 3D video teaching was 8.9/10, while the score for 2D video teaching was 5.9/10."
"3D video improved students’ spatial understanding ability and theoretical knowledge achievement." But this was for goggle-style 3D training, and no mention is made in the above article of using movie theater paper glasses, observing actual surgery.
So if 3D video medical training really is still in its early days, perhaps the time will still come when that auditorium full of paper-glasses-wearing med students watching a three-dimensional presentation of an actual prostatectomy on the jumbo screen in front of them, will become a reality.
A far cry from a 3D Godzilla leaping off the screen at a screaming audience in a local, crowded movie theater, but likely a much more valuable use of such a potentially exciting technology.