Not quite summer, but I may as well go back as far as May for a couple of things that I can think of worth saying something about, both have had fairly new things too so perhaps it’s good to bring them up again. I’ll be doing this in roughly chronological order but I forget exact details.

Let’s start this off with Ironman 2. It just came out on DVD but I haven’t got it or seen the new releases yet (if I even do). It’s a pretty standard superhero movie, probably on the better end of that spectrum (but there’s been a lot of very bad ones, so that doesn’t mean too much). Fun enough, but nothing exceptional. I wouldn’t think it would be possible (especially in the superhero style with an origin story in the first movie) to put more exposition in the sequel but somehow they succeeded. Fun but nothing special.

Also coming out in May (I think) was the game Red Dead Redemption. Made by the same company that does Grand Theft Auto, it’s basically that but western. It’s weird how this game has ended up, I really enjoyed the story, and played that through till completion (unless there’s another ending after the last one I saw, there was like 3 endings that I played through). There’s a few side things I never completed and I kinda wanted to go back and do that, but it just doesn’t have that same feel going back afterwards (especially with the *trying to avoid spoilers* drastic change your player goes through very near the end) and I can’t bring myself to want to play it again, despite the fact that they’ve definitely tried to add some levels of replayability to it. Multiplayer seems tacked on, bland and not well balanced but they keep adding DLC (with prices on the high end for more avatars and a game mode or two). The highlight of the game is the single player experience, and the scenery, and once you’ve done that there’s nothing left, and they’re not even trying to add to it while trying to add to the worse parts.

Inception is probably the most overrated movie since, well since Avatar. I suppose that’s not that impactful, since one year isn’t that long, but honestly I can’t think of anything that compares to either of these two in that respect (maybe the first Shrek). The story and all the details made no sense, and I don’t mean this like I didn’t understand what was happening, I did, it was just dumb and poorly thought through. Let’s start with what I think is the worst example of this, his top. He uses it to tell if it’s in a dream or not, as in his dreams it doesn’t stop spinning, but in someone else’s dream it does, so if he spins it, and it doesn’t stop then he’s obviously dreaming, but if it does stop then either he’s in someone else’s dream, or he’s in the real world. What garbage is this? It doesn’t work, and if you think about it at all you see this problem. Why was one character able to change shapes and no one else? My suspension of disbelief is willing to allow the movie to have coherent dreams which follow causality (which dreams don’t) and it’s willing to allow the technology to go into someone else’s dream. However, it does not allow things like “we’ll make it so that when your sleeping body falls you wake up” only to show many times sleeping bodies falling without waking up (but then they do when they try to wake them up). Why is gravity all screwed up on one level, but not the next? Luckily I think this is also the type of movie that after everyone talks about how good it is, largely forgets about shortly afterwards, as long as people don’t go bringing it up again, months after most people forgot, those Jerks!

On the other hand, Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World was a great movie that apparently no one went to see. The biggest complaint I’ve heard is that some characters were so funny they kind of stole the show from the main characters. I think the books are better than the movie, and although I agree many of the changes are things that are needed to condense the story to fit in the movie, and many of them were really good (this is the kind of thing that happens when you actually involve the original author in the making of the movie) I’m still kinda disappointed that in the movie, Scott never fought any robots, why would they take out fighting robots? One thing I find kinda weird too, is that people talk about Michael Cera being typecast, and that this is another instance of that, but the character of Scott Pilgrim isn’t really like any of his previous roles at all. Unfortunately that wasn’t conveyed in the script or to the director or to the actor. Scott is supposed to be a huge narcissist, and also quite stupid. It’s kinda weird, Scott Pilgrim the character from the books has many character traits similar to characters from a TV show apparently no one watched called Arrested Development. One however is almost the complete opposite of Scott Pilgrim, and I leave it to the reader to guess who I’m referring to. (If you don’t know, I guess you’re going to have to go and read the Scott Pilgrim books and watch Arrested Development, and even if you do know you should do those things again, because they’re so awesome).

The last Scott Pilgrim book also came out this summer (before the movie) and it was also good, but I’m not going to talk much about it, instead I want to talk about the game they made for PS3 and 360. Its release corresponded with the release of the movie, but followed more of the book (until the end, when it went off on its own, but the movie did that too) which among other things means in the game you do get to fight robots! I’ll claim here that this is easily one of the best games based off a movie, partly because it wasn’t really based off the movie. The game, the movie and the last book were all made at about the same time. It’s really quite amazing how well the game (with gameplay based of those old brawlers like Double Dragon, River City Ransom, or the Ninja Turtles games where you just walk through the levels beating guys up) feels like it belongs with the story (which is actually a pretty typical romantic comedy). This probably has more to do with Brian Lee O’Mally’s books than Ubisoft’s game but this game is easily worth the price to download (probably even a better value than a ticket to go see the movie).

NHL 11, EA’s most recent game in their ongoing series had what sounded like enough improvements that I felt like I should pick it up this year, and so I did, they talked so much about their new real-time physics, which is a big help, the thing that really sold me on it was the inclusion of the CHL (which to those of you who don’t know is made up of 3 leagues, the WHL, QMJHL, and OHL). Yeah I pretty much picked it up because I can play as the Kitchener Rangers in it. Year after year, at least lately, it’s been EA’s NHL series winning sports video game of the year awards, and there is a reason why. That said there’s still lots of room for improvement too. Off the top of my head, I can tell you that it’s really frustrating how the CPU is able to take the puck away from you, and skate on, whereas your methods to try the same thing only result in the puck being knocked away (often to just a different player on the other team). In EA’s soccer games, the players will try and take the ball away from another player just by running close to him, in their hockey games, the CPU will do that too, but the player will sit there and do nothing making some frustrating and unrealistic plays. There also seems to be a problem in this year’s game where players will pass in the wrong direction, often sending it directly to the other team, without any teammate who could have received the pass in that direction. Players will often move out of good scoring positions and into heavier cover for some reason, and they’ve still not fixed the problem where players do nothing to try and keep the puck onside (so if a player is near the line, they’ll often take the puck out of the zone and then put it back it for seemingly no reason causing a bad offside. Sometimes I wish EA’s different teams would work more closely together though. The NHL franchise has many good things about it, but could use some of the features from FIFA and some from Madden, and so on, it wouldn’t even cost much, as everything involved is already theirs.

I was going to talk about Civ 5 here too, but This is long enough for now, and since it came out September 21st I can call it a fall release and do that some other time.

How does 3D work in the first place? Close one eye, and look at the scene around your right now, like your desk and computer. Then open it, and close the other eye. Notice that things don’t look the same to each of your eyes. Your brain takes these images and puts them together to create a 3D scene for you. When you watch a normal movie though you don’t get that effect on the objects on the screen, both eyes see the exact same parts of that car that’s being chased down the highway by the aliens. In 3D movies, there’s 2 pictures on the screen, but you wear glasses so each lens blocks one of the images making each eye only see one, then your brain puts them together and you get the 3D effect.

So the idea of what is put up on the screen at the movie theatre is this, what would each eye see if the objects on the screen were real and behind (or in front of) the movie screen. This idea I have no problem with at all, however, here’s something to think about, what about the person sitting beside you? The movie is showing what you would see, but that person is somewhere else, they would see something different, but they’re still seeing the same two images you are, and what about the person who came late and got stuck in the front row at the very edge, or the couple sitting in the back row so they can make out?

Everyone in the theatre is seeing the same images, but only one person can be sitting in the spot where the images would combine into the proper scene from where the person is sitting. So what do the people in the non-optimal positions see? That’s what I wanted to find out, do they see the same objects in the same proportions, maybe just in slightly different positions than they should be (best case)? Does the object get warped in all sorts of ways including straight lines no longer being straight? I decided I would sit down and do some math to partially answer these questions. I got lazy and uncreative with my naming conventions so my example only uses a specific general case, but I think it shows enough evidence that 3D movies don’t work I’m not going to do the general case (which is really easy to do from here, it would just get very messy really fast)

A quick note before I start with the math: The math here isn’t very complicated, it’s actually at the grade 9 or 10 level, and thus would be a great test (there’s too many steps for it to really be a single questions, but for an entire test or exam or assignment this would be perfect). In the spirit of a high school math test I’m going to word it all like a problem you would see there too. My example is also missing a dimension, however, that doesn’t really change the way things work, and if you’re upset at me handwaving that dimension away, then let’s just say that they’re only looking at one horizontal line of the screen. The units are also kind of unrealistic, but I’ll discuss the implecations of that later.

Xavier and Yvette went to see a 3D movie, however when they got there they couldn’t find 2 seats beside each other so they had to sit in different parts of the theatre. Xavier managed to get the perfect seat right in the middle of the theatre (0,0), whereas Yvette ended up in front of him and to his left at point (-5,4), imagine their eyes are 1 unit to the left or right of their centres (so Xavier’s left eye at (-1,0) and right at (1,0) and Yvette’s at (-6,4) and (-4,4)). The screen is 10 units in front of Xavier (at y=10). At one scene in the movie Xavier sees the characters Alice at position (4,12), Bob at (4,18) and Carol at (-4,12). At what position does Yvette see the characters?

I have the answer, but I said “proof” in the title of this post, so I think I should explain how I got the answer. Feel free to double check my numbers if you want, but I’m not going to transcribe them all for you right now.

First, find equations for the 6 lines that go between a character and one of Xavier’s eyes. Then find the intersection point of those lines with the screen. Now, take the points on the screen that correspond to Xavier’s left eye, and find the 3 lines that go through them and Yvette’s left eye, and the same for the right eye. You should now have 6 lines which each correspond to a character’s screen position and one of Yvette’s eyes. The last thing you need to do is find the intersection points between the lines that correspond between each character, and one of the eyes, the point of intersection should be where Yvette sees the character. This past paragraph probably sounded very confusing, and so to hopefully make it make more sense here’s a diagram (not to Scale) that sort of shows the process for one character.

So what are the answers to my question? Well, Yvette sees Alice at (5,11.2), Bob at (8, 14.8) and Carol at (-3,11.2). What’s the most obvious thing to note between this set of numbers and the original set ( (4,12), (4,18) and (-4,12) )? Well the original set formed a right angled triangle, whereas the Yvette data does not. Distances (and proportional distances) are also not the same (that said, it’s not possible for one of angles or distances to not work and the other one to work). Where Xavier sees a square, Yvette does not, and if in the movie Carol threw 2 balls, one to Alice, and one to Bob, if Xavier saw them going at the same speed, Yvette would see the ball going to Bob as being faster than the one to Alice.

Alright, I’m almost done now. To sort of conclude, this data shows that in terms of viewing a 3D movie, angles and distances in the image are relative to the observers based on their positions, unless you are sitting in the absolutely ideal position (and there is only going to be one) then the objects will be warped.

Disclaimers: The scale used in the example has the screen only 5 times the distance between eyes from the furthest person’s face, only 3 eye lengths from the closer person, although warping is still bound to happen it’s not going to be as severe as my data showed, that said, I would not be surprised to hear of an uncanny valley like effect where the things that are almost right but not quite are more unsettling than those that are more obviously wrong.  Final disclaimer, the thought process I used here I came up with independently of any other similar ideas if they exist, I’m sure they must because it seemed so obvious to me, but I’ve yet to encounter them, if you know of it let me know, I bet they were able to phrase things more eloquently than I did.