The three-dimensional adjective is used to describe what has three dimensions. To understand what the notion refers to, therefore, it is necessary to understand the concept of dimension.
In the context of physics and geometry, the idea of dimension refers to the smallest number of coordinates needed to locate a point. A line, in this sense, is one-dimensional: you hit a coordinate to locate any point on it. The plans, on the other hand, have two dimensions, since it is essential to know the longitude and latitude to locate a point.
Following the same reasoning, three-dimensional objects require the knowledge of three coordinates to find a point within them. It is often said that the space around us is three-dimensional, although there are more dimensions (some people include time as another dimension, for example). In general, it can be noted that height (or depth), length, and width are present in three-dimensional space. Knowing these three coordinates, it is possible to locate a point in space. Currently, three-dimensionality usually appears as an effect or phenomenon that produces two-dimensional objects, such as a television screen. In these cases, the three-dimensional is a simulation that is achieved from the projection of certain data. A person who wears the corresponding glasses in a cinema and watches a 3D film can “feel” that the action takes place in three-dimensional space and not on a screen, since the images appear to be projected in three dimensions. This type of three-dimensional effect is often called stereoscopic, since it is obtained by projecting two simultaneous images, one for each eye, each from a slightly different perspective. In other words, although for many 3D is nothing more than a fad for filmmakers and video game developers, it manages to make the content on the screen less abstract, since it represents it in a way that is much closer to what our eyes perceive on the screen. reality. Of course, not everyone can enjoy three-dimensional content: on the one hand, there are people who have lost an eye or who have certain health problems that prevent them from correctly perceiving depth; on the other hand, this effect causes headaches in some, especially after exposures lasting several hours. These drawbacks make it difficult for 3D to spread widely as a basic form of audiovisual content projection, but this does not prevent it from gaining more and more strength in the market.
Faced with the new awakening of stereoscopic 3D (let’s not forget that its origins go back more than a century, when in 1833 a British physicist named Charles Wheatstone created the “Mirror” to visualize images in three dimensions), the public began to have difficulties. to understand the meaning of the term “three-dimensional”, since until then it was almost exclusively limited to the environment of computer generated graphics, such as those used for Pixar films. In the field of video games, three dimensions became the norm in the mid-1990s, thanks in large part to the success of consoles like the Nintendo 64, Playstation, and Dreamcast. However, the experiences of a three-dimensional game are very different from what a two-dimensional game can offer; For this reason, after the “3D fever”, two-dimensional games reappeared, and today there is a greater variety on the market. As a curious fact, today it is normal to use three-dimensional graphics to create two-dimensional content, and it is enough to use an orthogonal projection to nullify the perspective (if the camera does not perceive the deformation of the objects on the wide side). of the Z, then the sensation of depth disappears, even though we are seeing a three-dimensional model).
