Why am I suddenly buying up every 3D Blu-ray I can find after 3D became one of the biggest tech flops of all time?
The technology’s finally ready for 3D movies to shine, more than 15 years since James Cameron’s Avatar wowed me on the big screen and went on to become the highest-grossing film worldwide. Video glasses are giving me the experience I’ve always desired.
I’ve always loved 3D movies, but viewing them was awkward. Walking into a movie theater with a pair of polarized glasses, I would only get half the resolution and roughly half the brightness, since those glasses had to split one reflected image between my two eyes. Almost every 3D technology cuts something you care about in half, whether it’s resolution (see also: Nintendo 3DS) or the refresh rate and flicker you get with active shutter glasses.
But what if you had a full screen for each eye? That’s what video glasses can provide.
Last year, I began testing a pair of Xreal One Pro glasses, which primarily give you a gigantic flat screen, like a private theater, for whatever you plug in. But that screen doesn’t technically need to stay flat. If you press and hold the right button, Xreal can give you independent left and right views for side-by-side (SBS 3D) content. With proper content, you get a full 1080p view for each eye.
There are SBS 3D toggles in popular video player apps for VR headsets like the Meta Quest and Steam Frame, too — and the Apple Vision Pro and upcoming Meta VR Glasses let you natively stream 3D films.
The water in Moana, a glass-covered clock in Zootopia 2, the helmets in Gravity, suiting up in giant robots in Pacific Rim, lightcycles in Tron: Legacy, comic book panels coming to life in Into the Spider-Verse — there’s just so much more depth to see.
When the ocean parts to let Moana through, it no longer feels like looking at a flat wall of water. It’s a living chunk of ocean with life swimming inside. The Lego Movie went from “wow those are some realistic-looking CG Lego bricks on a flat screen” to “I just got teleported into an entire Lego diorama.” In Avatar, the holographic displays in the ops room are mind-blowing. Even the flat rectangular monitors have 3D layers within.
Cockpits and helmets and Tron: Legacy lightcycles and Mad Max: Fury Road’s convoy of battling vehicles — anything with transparent glass is a treat. There’s distinct detail on the faces inside the glass, the structures outside, beads of water or scratches on the glass itself, even reflections of the outside world, depending on the film.
Billie Eilish’s new concert film, shot by James Cameron with 16 twin cameras including four remote-controlled AGITO camera rigs, looked incredible in the Meta VR Glasses during a brief demo. He got up close and personal with the concert, like few VR concert recordings do. In a demo with the Google / Xreal Aura, I watched a tiny bit of the interactive nature documentary Galapagos: The Last Eden and was entranced by the gorgeous baby seals, the grains of sand in their shiny fur, the fuzzy depth of the hair on their skin.
Regardless of the hardware, it almost feels like I can reach out and touch a character’s face in 3D, feel their emotions and wrinkles and scars more vividly, once they have depth.
Or, in the case of Werner Herzog’s cult-classic 3D documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams, I could appreciate how the world’s oldest surviving art isn’t flat — the 32,000-year-old cave paintings took form thanks to their three-dimensional canvas. “A bulging rock is now a bulging neck of a bison that attacks you,” Herzog explained to us earlier this year.
When I fired up Gravity for what I thought would be a brief test, late at night in bed, I wound up watching the entire film. It all feels a bit like when I bought my first decent set of headphones — I never knew what I was missing, but now I want to revisit all my favorites to experience them more deeply.
Not all 3D content is equal. Few live-action movies were truly filmed with twin cameras in recent years. In fake or poorly converted 3D movies, you’ll often see a “billboard” effect where it looks like there are flat layers of people or objects in the background instead of true depth.
But the biggest catch is that 3D movies aren’t easy to just buy and play. Even though 3D films are still coming to theaters, you can’t necessarily stream them or buy a high-quality copy. 4K Blu-ray doesn’t support 3D at all. 3D Blu-rays were the last discs to offer 3D, and as FlatPanelsHD pointed out last year, that means most physical 3D movies are stuck in the past at 1080p, 24fps, without HDR.
Even 3D Blu-rays aren’t necessarily easy to find: I had to nab a copy of Cave of Forgotten Dreams off eBay, and paid a pretty penny to ship a rare-ish copy of Into the Spider-Verse from Thailand.
Here’s the good news: The leading headset makers are starting to convince Hollywood it’s time to stream their 3D collections instead.
In 2024, the Apple Vision Pro launched with by far the best 3D movie experience yet, now with 4K, HDR, spatial audio, some (Avatar) films at 48fps, HEVC encoding, free 3D upgrades for many films you’d already purchased in 2D, and exclusive access to the largest catalog of 3D films in existence on Disney Plus. (Modern Disney animated films are natively rendered in digital 3D, and most Disney-owned Marvel films got a 3D conversion to jazz up their theatrical appeal.)
Soon, you’ll no longer need a $3,500 Apple headset to watch those films or convert them from old discs — you’ll be able to stream them with a $350 Meta Quest 3S or $600 Quest 3, as well as the new $1,300 Meta VR Glasses, Meta director of entertainment Sarah Malkin confirms to The Verge.
Meta’s headset will offer 3D movies to subscribers in the Disney Plus, HBO, Paramount Plus, and Peacock apps, she says, with some of that starting later this fall.
And by the time the Meta VR Glasses launch in spring, there will be “hundreds of 3D films available” to rent or buy though Meta’s TV app, as well as some free 3D content. They shouldn’t cost more than traditional movies, either, she says: “Our 3D movies will also be in line with typical pricing for 2D Ultra High Definition (UHD) films.”
(In case you’re wondering, she also says the Meta VR Glasses’ three-hour battery life quote should cover a full 3D movie “watched in Theater mode if starting with the device fully charged.”)
In the meanwhile, I’m experiencing 3D the hacky way: by ripping discs. Every time I walk into a thrift store, I hunt for a 3D Blu-ray or two. I pop them into an old external USB Blu-ray reader, then let MakeMKV spend half an hour per movie to produce a 30-to-40GB multi-view (MVC) file. I pop that into BD3D2MK3D for another 50 minutes per movie to spit out a high-quality 3840 x 1080 “Full-SBS” file that’s half the size of the MVC.
I drop that onto an SD card, pop it into the Steam Deck, plug in the Xreal glasses, fire up VLC Media Player, then flip the glasses into 3D mode. It’s a lot of friction, but for me, the payoff is worth it.
Even though I’m mostly watching old movies, it feels like a taste of the future. But you know what they say: Everything old is eventually new again.
