TECHNOLOGY
Today the Zapbox was delivered through Amazon by way of the US Postal Service. I ordered it ten days ago. It is the third way, and the best so far, of looking at spatial videos in 3D. It is an ungainly device that consists mainly of a way to look through a set of glasses attached to your head by which you can see the entire room in 3D or passthrough reality, not seeing the actual room but a video of my room. And at the the same time I can see floating in space the screen of the 3D video which I can move closer or father away through two little controllers which I hold in my hand. I can walk around the room, which I can see in a pixelated way, and the flat screen with the 3D video moves with me but I can turn around and the flat screen will remain behind me. This is all accomplished by an app on my iPhone which manipulates the three cameras on the phone in a new way.
This $100 Zapbox does what the $3500 Vision Pro does, but not as clearly or as realistically. Friday afternoon I am going to Greenville, South Carolina, to have the Vision Pro demonstrated for me and I‘ll have to decide whether to buy it.
As you can see, I am unprepared to make this decision of whether to spend a vast amount of money, $3500, for a device that I barely understand. I have made perhaps 75 spatial 3D movies of Sri Lanka and India, and the other night the ballad night in Marshall. As flat screen videos all of these look terrific. I‘ve observed them in four ways: flat on my iPad, in 3D with the $10 Google Cardboard stereoscopic viewer, the $5 blue and red 3D glasses in anaglyph form, and now in the Zapbox. All of these 3d attempts are fuzzy while the flatscreen video, one half of these two stereoscopic videos, is very clear.
The flat screen videos look terrific. But when I see the fuzzy stereoscopic 3D spatial videos the 3D videos seem much more alive in some subtle way than the flat screen videos even when fuzzy. I realize that I have in many ways accepted living in a flat world in films in theaters, wide screen TV, photographs on the wall, and in self made videos all lived in a flatland world. I am so used to it that all of these ways of reproducing experience seem normal and real until I see 3D, even poorly done 3D. The reason is because this is actually the way I see everything with my two eyes being 4 inches apart and seeing everything in 3D.
So the real issue for me is how to transition from a flat world to a 3D world which is the one that I am pretty sure all of us will be entering in the next ten years when everything: films, TV, photographs, music, Facetime calls will be in 3D. We will wonder that we were ever satisfied with Flatland. It will be similar to the shift from black and white movies or TV shows to color, from only live concerts to 78 rpm records to streaming music in first stereo sound and then in surround sound.
I am entering a new world and my past experience is not much help. I know the shift will be gradual, as every shift has been, and more expensive at first, as every shift has been, and constantly changing and making everything I buy almost instantly out of date. I listen to the advice of technocrats, knowing that their previous advice was often misleading and their current advice is as much guesswork as my trying to figure out what is coming for me.
I will probably leap into the unknown, make a wild guess, and then see what happens, a little like my first trip to Greece when I pushed the acceptance button on a cheap flight with no idea what I was getting myself into or when I, months ago, bought a ticket to Geneva for ten days from now not knowing what was going to happen and discovering at this point that little that I planned will happen and that what I didn‘t plan for will turn out to be pretty marvelous. So wish me luck on whether I buy a $3500 Vision Pro or not, as I likely leap into the unknown.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 