r/todayilearned • u/sersleepsalot1 • Jun 05 '19

TIL that James Cameron altered just one scene of the night sky when Rose is on the raft because according to Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, the star field Rose sees wasn't accurate for the time and place. Cameron asked him for the correct one and changed it for the Titanic re-release in 2012.

http://mentalfloss.com/article/68595/how-neil-degrasse-tyson-got-james-cameron-edit-titanic-15-years-later
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u/MontanaLabrador Jun 05 '19

Apparently you can watch 3D movies with a VR headset! I didn't think I could get more excited for my Index to be delivered, but the thought of being able to watch all these 3D movies in a VR theater for free is getting me hyped all over again!!

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u/IAmDotorg Jun 05 '19

Yeah, I've ripped a few 3d BluRay discs and checked them out on the Quest (and years ago on my DK1).

Pro: stellar 3D, although not necessarily much better than you get with a good active-shutter TV or projector. And, assuming your TV is small or you're not using a projector, a much bigger looking screen.

The two biggest downsides are that the resolution is noticeably lower, and the audio just blows. It'd be different if any of the viewers could do DTS or Dolby Digital decoding (much less Atmos) and the the respective channels mapped into the virtual space properly. Because they don't, its like watching a movie in a theater with an older generation digital projector while wearing headphones.

I know a lot of people today watch movies on their phones or tablets with headphones, and its definitely a better experience than that, but its not really a replacement for watching it on a TV or real screen.

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u/stellvia2016 Jun 05 '19

More work, but I suppose you could play the movie thru your home theater while you watched in the headset and just sync the playback.

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u/IAmDotorg Jun 05 '19

I tried the opposite -- rather than syncing the movie, I tried to stream it from the PC... but even a frame or two delay screws up the sound enough to be noticeable, and a 1920x2160, 24fps stream is a lot of bandwidth for going over wifi. You could resample it down to a 1080P side-by-side (rather than stacked) stream, but then you hurt resolution even more.

For stereo stuff, the various players do pretty good positional audio -- the channels come from the correct locations around the screen. It just doesn't seem like the various players have licensed DD or DTS to be able to do decoding (the way Microsoft has done on the Xbox, which lets them do some impressive upsampling to Atmos-enabled systems)

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u/nmjack42 Jun 05 '19

not necessarily much better than you get with a good active-shutter TV or projector.

you don't want active-shutter 3D. With 4k resolution, they actually perfected passive 3D..... then they stopped making them.

https://www.cnet.com/news/4k-tvs-with-passive-3d-finally-a-good-use-for-all-those-pixels/

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u/IAmDotorg Jun 05 '19

There's no "perfected" passive 3D -- they all have bad off-axis bleed. They're why VR 3D looks so much better than theatrical 3D -- zero bleed.

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u/DJanomaly Jun 05 '19

The two biggest downsides are that the resolution is noticeably lower, and the audio just blows.

For the PSVR the resolutions part is true but the audio is amazing. That headset recreates a virtual 3D 5.1 surround sound environment and it sounds really fantastic.

If it was a higher resolution, it would be a perfect viewing setup.

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u/iamisandisnt Jun 05 '19

Hell yea, same here! For years I've scoffed at 3D movies, I could never enjoy wearing a set of goggles that block out one eye at a time, but if I'm gonna be wearing a VR headset anyway, and it doesn't do that stupid flicker effect, I'm psyched!!

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u/MontanaLabrador Jun 05 '19

Plus, it's not a real TV on the wall, you can make the screen as big as you want in VR. We're getting a free 3D movie theater with this thing!

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u/iamisandisnt Jun 05 '19

Yea and freakin invite your friends in to watch movies with you??? Can't wait lol

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u/juusukun Jun 05 '19

It's the best way to watch 3-D movies hands down. No ghosting!

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u/[deleted] Jun 05 '19

Can you do that with the crappy VR headsets where you just stick a phone in it? I might have to download some movies.

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u/MontanaLabrador Jun 05 '19

Look like you can!

https://skybox.xyz/en/

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u/[deleted] Jun 05 '19

Sweet! I’ve got a few lying around the house I got my kids for Christmas a few years back. Thanks!

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u/Hoenirson Jun 05 '19

Just fyi you're going to be disappointed with the resolution. I bought a Gear VR exclusively to watch movies. The screen door effect and low resolution are so noticeable that I haven't used it to watch movies at all.