For VR Prophets, 3DTV Serves as a LeBron-Sized Cautionary Tale

Anthony Crupi
·6 min read
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The first (and last) time I gave 3DTV a whirl was on Dec. 17, 2010, and while memories are distorted with every recollection—in the process of retrieving files from the jellified goop that is your internal hard drive, the brain subtly overwrites the data just enough to mess with it—my notes from that period have helped fill in a lot of the autobiographical blank spots. For example, I otherwise might have completely forgotten about the knee-buckling headache that announced itself about an hour after I’d ditched the goofy 3D goggles for the real thing; at the same time, there’s no effacing the foundational memory of watching LeBron James play in meatspace, or the cruel chants that went up in the Garden whenever they splashed Drake’s face on the videoboard.

According to the Word doc titled “3DKnicks121710,” I’d agreed to make my way to MSG on a cold Friday night to watch LeBron and the Miami Heat take on Danilo Gallinari, Amar’e Stoudemire and the rest of an outclassed Knicks squad in what was to be the first-ever NBA game to be televised by ESPN’s new 3DTV network. The viewing party took place in a cordoned-off area of the Garden, one that included a few rows of church-basement folding chairs, an oversized TV set and a cooler in which about a dozen floating cans of beer lorded it over a submerged sixer of Pepsi. 

If it’s a little weird to watch a televised version of an event that is taking place just a few hundred feet away, it’s way weirder to do so while wearing the visor LeVar Burton had clamped to his face on that one Star Trek show. Because looking goofy is more or less everyone’s default setting when they attend sporting events—fans spend the hours before game time constructing picket fences out of cardboard on the off chance that the ticketholder to their immediate right might fashion a capital “D” out of an old Cologuard® box—the attendant sense of mortification isn’t all that destabilizing.

Unfortunately, many of the details about the experience of watching a game in three dimensions have been lost to the ravages of time, and my seeming disinterest in taking notes took hold once the second quarter got underway. But for a few spidery lines of marginalia (“Avatar, only nowhere near as sucky” is crowded by the cryptic “Amar’e just happens to people”), there’s no evidence to suggest that the visuals were terribly gripping. Before the halftime buzzer sounded, I’d deposited the Panasonic glasses on my chair before sneaking off to grab a seat in section 108. In real life, LeBron is so big he’s practically in five dimensions.

Perhaps it was the demoralizing 113-91 loss, or maybe Drake had some sort of Havana Syndrome device secreted in the pocket of his leather jacket, but by the time the crowd started serenading the Degrassi: The Next Generation alum with rhymed swears, my mental weather had become downright cataclysmic. Accompanied as it was by a sort of Trotsky-grade headache, a sudden onset of vertigo made for some real difficulties on the trying-not-to-fall-down front. (Imagine having to deal with the bed spins while fully upright and miles away from one’s own bunk, and you’re about halfway there.) I felt doomed. Afflicted.

Two-and-a-half years after the Knicks temporarily broke the inside of my head—by the next morning, the world was decidedly less dizzy-making, although the eyestrain took a bit longer to sort itself out—ESPN pulled the plug on its 3DTV channel. The fad had never really caught on with a viable subset of consumers, and while pundits blamed everything from the ridiculous eyewear to a rash of not-uncommon physical complaints, the timing of the 3D rollout couldn’t have been any worse. By 2010, 65% of all U.S. TV homes had traded up for an HD set, a luxury which at the time could cost as much as $7,000 for a top-of-the-line 55” LED model. With the Great Recession still skulking around in the rearview mirror, relatively few Americans were willing (or able) to fork over a similar sum for another newfangled home-theater device—not while the novelty of HD was still as fresh as a crisp $100 bill.

A cap on discretionary spending wasn’t the only contributing factor to the death of the 3DTV dream. As it turns out, delivering stereoscopic pictures was a bandwidth-depleting exercise, and given the myriad demands on the cable plant—HDTV and the return-pathway functionalities of the DVR already taxed the capacities of pay-TV’s digital infrastructure—a fully-realized 3D offering likely would have given operators fits. More to the point, by the time ESPN started kicking the tires on 3D, HDTV had already established itself as an essential feature of the American living room. Just as a consumer who was in the market for a new set in 1960 would surely upgrade from black-and-white to color, by 2010 it had become commonplace for consumers to ditch their muddy old standard-definition sets in favor of the aesthetically superior HD format.

If the memories of the short-lived 3DTV craze have been worn thin by time and tide, 2012 certainly wasn’t the first time that a much-ballyhooed tech gizmo was met with a universal shrug. Betamax was the superior product, but at a remove of nearly a quarter-century, nobody rues the loss of the thing that the VCR eventually killed off. (For that matter, it’s hard to imagine anyone getting all misty over the demise of the VCR.) Rotary phones were great if you liked making circles with your fingers, and even Wonkavision never really managed to bounce back from the whole Mike Teevee thing. Under the logic of hyper-accelerated tech cycles, the shock of the new now wears off before the product is fully unboxed, and the new-new thing that replaces yesterday’s novelty has all the staying power of a carton of eggnog.

The market still teems with plenty of can’t-miss products and schemes that aren’t necessarily built for the long haul. For every proselytizer of AI and VR, there are millions of us who will get along just fine without the less-than-convincing approximations of human thought and expression and all the doofy headsets.

VR’s been the Next Big Thing since William Gibson coined the term “cyberspace” in 1982, and it’s still about as niche as chess-boxing. AI is the answer to a question that nobody with a soul has ever asked. And if both of these concepts were to disappear tomorrow, something equally pointless will have taken their place by the time the last Oculus Rift goes up for bid on eBay.

Since the Apple Vision Pro headset hit the market in February, global sales of the $3,499 gizmos are hovering at around 200,000 units. It’s a “game changer,” according to the perpetual hype machine that is the Internet, and no one you know owns one. If you’d like to be the first on your block to grab a pair, bear in mind that the VR specs aren’t for everyone. Much like the 3DTV goggles of yesteryear, the Vision Pro is not recommended for use by pregnant women, habitual drunkards and small children. Drake probably owns a dozen.

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