Plumbing more depths

Now that we've talked about a frightfully shallow movie and a fantasy novel investigating the depths of the planet, let's talk about some different depths.

As I mentioned earlier, I changed FiOS plans recently, and one of the added channels is ESPN 3D. I was curious to see how that would look, but it generally doesn't have a lot of current material.

But I was thrilled to hear that the NBA Finals would be showing there, as that's certainly current material. As I think I alluded earlier, I'm not a bit NBA fan. These days, I don't watch complete games, and rarely even watch more than a couple of minutes of games. This season, I watched some of the season-opening Heat/Celtics game, and I think that was it for the regular season. I watched pieces of a few playoff games (oddly, the Heat dominated the chunks of the games I watched with them, even if they didn't really dominate that series, or even that game, outside of the piece I saw).

But, to see it in 3D? Now, that I was curious about. I still haven't watched a full game, but I saw pretty good pieces of the second and third games.

What do I think about the channel? It's kind of interesting, in a way, but because they don't have a whole lot of audience (it's more a proof-of-concept thing, I think, than something looking to generate immediate revenue) there isn't a whole lot of advertising. So the announcers need to be better, because they have more time to fill. But since they aren't the big-audience announcers, they aren't better. But since I mostly ignore them, I guess it isn't too bad.

But what I find interesting is that you can see a lot more of the arena during timeouts and such than normally. It's games that haven't been ruined by commercials (well, mostly). At least, it seems that way.

Another piece that's interesting is that there are only a few commercials. Somewhat ironically, one of them is for Sony 3D TVs where they're selling 3D. Hello, you're sending this commercial to people who already have a 3D TV, so you don't need to sell them on the concept.

Getting to the game itself, it's a bit weird. The perspective seems off, in a way, but I haven't really been able to quantify how. The players seem smaller, somehow, and the scale just seems ... off, I guess. But the depth of the whole thing is still pretty cool. I think it'll do very well if they can figure out the perspective issue (they should especially look at cameras close to the crowd; things really look wonky if someone in the crowd sticks their arm up into the frame).

I'm definitely curious to see how things look when there's a bit more material. And is there any chance of an NHL 3D channel? I'd like to see it.