My family and I tried to enjoy the movie Napoleon late last year - and unwisely selected the “ScreenX” version. Oh, my1.
What ScreenX promises you’ll see.2
What I saw? Well, I can’t show you, because I don’t take pictures in movie theaters - but this experience tested my mettle greatly. You’ll see in the above photo realistic fish swimming around in a 270 degree panorama. There’s even a gushing 30-second YouTube video from someone who “hosted a screening of Napoleon in ScreenX!”
Please note the side views in this happy talk video are from other movies - not Napoleon. Movies, that is, that understood they would need to capture content for these side walls. Other sites that tout this technology for this Napoleon inevitably show the effect during still scenes, panoramic vistas of Moscow, etc. But the effect is mainly reserved for epic battle scenes, and here is where the technology breaks down. The filmmaker for Napoleon (or ScreenX coder) apparently used CGI to extend the aperture, which led to such distractions as horses cartoonishly jerking side to side, often not touching the ground. A line of cartoon men digging a trench, with several of them making precisely the same movements. Main characters who drift into the side views maintain the expression they wore when they “left” the main screen. Soldiers running a few feet above the battlefield surface. It was, in a word, absurd and distracting.
Visual acuity
One of the more amazing things I learned while dabbling in neuroscience literature related to our sight. Perhaps because we are both predator and prey, we are gifted with an amazing ability to focus. Having two eyes looking forward allows us depth perception, an ability to judge distance and such. The tradeoff is that our peripheral vision is, for the most part, a product of our imagination. Most of our active perception of what’s happening exists within a narrow vision tunnel - then our brains makes a note of what’s outside of that tunnel and “paints a picture” of the gaps.. Granted, when something in that area changes, we have enough awareness to turn and focus, re-acquiring the current situation as best we can perceive it.
What we see in the periphery, just outside the direct focus of the eye, may sometimes be a visual illusion, according to new findings published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The findings suggest that even though our peripheral vision is less accurate and detailed than what we see in the center of the visual field, we may not notice a qualitative difference because our visual processing system actually fills in some of what we “see” in the periphery.
“Our findings show that, under the right circumstances, a large part of the periphery may become a visual illusion,” says psychology researcher Marte Otten from the University of Amsterdam, lead author on the new research. “This effect seems to hold for many basic visual features, indicating that this ‘filling in’ is a general, and fundamental, perceptual mechanism.”
So we accept and adapt to crude paintings of the happenings off to the side of our vision. And if ScreenX was going for that, then the instructions should have included “never look to the side.” When we do this, our focus also shifts. ScreenX does not. Instead it gives us the jittery, mostly cartoonish of what occurs in peripheral vision. That, my friends, is most distracting.
While the apparent intent of ScreenX is to provide natural peripheral images, and this may be possible in movies intended for this format, such as Top Gun Maverick where actual footage is taken for these side views: For movies where the filmmaker did not capture live action to fill the walls, you are treated instead to CGI animation. The result is movement in your peripheral vision that continually draws your attention to the jerky CGI-developed unnerving valley. (This wasn’t realistic enough to be considered uncanny valley, so I’m here inventing a new term.)3
As for the movie itself, I was left unimpressed. Oh sure, reliving the battle (myth) of Austerlitz was entertaining, but I cringed thinking how the “sex” scenes were landing on the retinas of my teen grandkids. Happily the only comment lobbed my way from my grandson amounted to: “I don’t think his second wife was Russian.” Recalibrating my sense of that boy now.
Regal Cinema with 35 minutes of ads, some of them repeated back to back, convinced my entire family to avoid theaters for another generation.
https://www.cineplex.com/experiences/screenx
https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-the-uncanny-valley-4846247
Thank you for the warning. They should label that technology “for Surrealist purposes only”
Fascinating, John.
Thanks.