Rueing the Day

Here are some arguments against 3D conversions in education:

Why 2D-to-3D conversions of educational content will make all of us rue the day

• There’s too much junk. I have been a large purchaser of traditional 2D digital content for many years. After our school district deployed a richly endowed digital content management system, we began the laborious process of acquiring digital content licenses en masse for our teachers. One thing I learned in the process was echoed by thousands of teachers: in a typical digital content collection, only 5% of the content is worth using. The rest is filler. It just makes the provider's collection look bigger. We were forced to cherry pick the best titles. “Why pay for the junk,” we thought? Some companies wouldn’t play ball on that iTunes-like playing field. So we skipped them. For that reason alone, 2D-3D conversions will ruin the promise and potential of 3D in the educational marketplace.
• It’s too expensive. 2D educational content, converted to stereo 3D, will also require DeSouza’s “visual grammar change” and many publishing companies will simply not pay for z-depth enhancements, slowing, savoring, or other visual improvements. Yet DeSouza has other ideas about this limitation. "Another thing to keep in mind," he adds, "is that much educational content is produced in CG. (DirectX, OpenGl) etc. If this is true, by default they have a Z-buffer channel that can produce stereoscopic 3D. The nvidia stereo drivers operate this way for example." This could greatly lower costs. Still, I hold my ground for one big reason: most digital content companies in the education space license their products from smaller producers, as is. Any incentive to improve the product is mitigated, simply because it is decentralized.

I know the emotions and the players involved in the 3D conversion debate.  Let the debate now extend to education.