How Does Screen X Work?

Cinemas are struggling these days. After all, why would anyone pay, for just one film, a multiple of the amount for which they could have access to hundreds of movies at some streaming service? The situation was bad enough before the pandemic, but when for months we could not go to the cinema at all, we got used to watching movies in our living room. It has been difficult to get these customers back.

What could persuade a potential movie-goer to pay (much) more to abandon the couch and go to the cinema again? The general idea is to provide experiences we could not have at home. One such experience is 3D. Another is what has been labeled 4D: Your seats move, there is artificial wind in your hair, and so on. But there is a relatively old technique that has made a surprising comeback in recent years and it is known as Screen X.

Screen X is based on a very simple idea: Let's use not just the wall that the seats are facing, but also the two side walls. So the screen where the action is gets expanded to the side walls. This is not something that can be experienced at home, no matter how good a projector you invested in during the pandemic.

This technique had been used primarily for South Korean blockbusters, but in recent months and years, it has been used for more Hollywood movies as well. One important reason for this comeback is the increasing ability of AI to create the side projections. Shooting with three cameras—one for the main screen and one for each side wall—is expensive. It's also somewhat wasteful, given that in the human visual system the periphery of the visual field is represented in a very indeterminate manner. So a crisp high-resolution technicolor projection and a blurry low-tech one would not actually be distinguishable. As a result, instead of using three times the normal footage, it is also possible to just use AI to extrapolate from the image on the main screen and use the resulting footage on the side walls. There will be some visual oddities if you pay close attention, but then, why would you? The main action is on the screen in front of you, not in your peripheral vision.

Screen X emulates some of the effects of virtual reality inasmuch as a much larger proportion of your visual field is taken up by the movie. These effects depend heavily on the size of the screens, where exactly you are sitting in the room, and especially on the intensity of camera movements. But the dominant audience reaction is that while all this can be riveting for a couple of seconds, by the end of the movie, it tends to be distracting and somewhat annoying. The reason is a widely researched perceptual phenomenon known as perceptual adaptation.

Here is a very simple example of perceptual adaptation that you can create in your bathroom: Put your left hand in a bowl of cold water and put your right hand in a bowl of very warm water. Wait a couple of minutes. Now put both hands in a third bowl, which has lukewarm water. The same bowl of (lukewarm) water will feel very hot for your left hand and it will feel very cold for your right hand. It’s quite a disconcerting experience.

And just as your hands get used to the temperature of the water, your vision also gets used to the surround experience that Screen X provides. And given that there is very little visual interest in these parts of the visual screen, your attention is still focused on the main screen, making the projections on the side walls at best irrelevant, and at worst distracting.

Seeing a movie in the cinema can be a vastly superior experience to streaming it at home. But I am not sure Screen X will convince movie-goers of this.