That's how I felt at 2001: A Space Odyssey
when it first came out, in 'cinerama's super-wide, trifurcated screen. I was right up front, and I WAS floating around in space. My entire field of vision (even when I turned my head) was filled by the projected image. I was *there* in the scene (no longer seated indoors, subject to gravity) solely through the removal of the 'frame' around the images. This is why the shows at the Planetarium, Worlds Fair et al induce vertigo with 2-D presentations. A hemi-hexagonal 3 screen/3 camera synch that wraps past the viewer's periphery gets viscerally interpreted by the brain as 'reality'; every scene or image ('3-D' no less than others) that ends within your field of vision--at the edge of your TV or a theater screen--explicitly contains non-stop visual reminder of where you really are, and are NOT.
I can't really get down to business at Battlefield3 (an online multiplayer 'first-person shooter' type video game) until I'm so close I've got my nose stuck in the TV. I'm life-sized, squinting at 3rd floor windows 300m 'into' the *2D* display to catch the glint of snipers' scopes...as if my life depended on it(!). That close to the TV (where its edges, the 'borders of fantasy and reality' to the eyes/brain, are not discernably in my field of view), I can break out in a sweat in tense moments, ripple from adrenaline after surviving some brutal encounter. When I sit back farther and 'just play a video game'---not at all. My brain's not going to immerse totally in the virtual events when I can see past the edges of them. When I'm flying a jet in the aforementioned game, I can look around the cockpit and out the sides/top of my aircraft, and the game's 'rendering engine' shows it.
To me, first-person video games ARE '3-D'. 'Walk' up to an object. What's it look like as you walk around it? Well, it's contour and porportion morph at the speed 'you' are moving as allowed by the game's framerate. If I can walk up to something and either get in or, say, sneak around BEHIND it (in looking-out-of-ones-eyesockets view), slap C4 on it, and blow it into the air, then I'm in a '3-D environment' on my 2-D TV.......and, for me, THAT'S Entertainment, as they used to say (at MGM!).
