Flat chess pieces?

Hey everyone one of my proffesors brought something intresting up to me today. He had learned chess originally from books and the internet and was not used to otb chess. It took him awhile until he started using real chess pieces and now when he does, he feels he has to take extra time to analyze the board to understand what pieces are what, because of this it is possible that his game suffers. He has no problem with 2d pieces though. I was wondering two things because of this.

1)  Does anyone else have any similiar problems to this?

2) Do you think it would be a good idea to try to creat 2d chess sets?

2D chess sets already exist (or as close to 2D as you can get).

Here a couple of examples:

For me it was the other way around. I wasn't used to 2d pieces because I had played OTB. I use the 3d Staunton set here. (Braces himself for ridicule)

Maybe he should just play OTB more and analyze using a real board and pieces as well. I would think he would get used to it pretty quickly. Those flat pieces are useless in official games and will only make his "problem" worse.

The 2D set depicted in post #2 is the chessmate travel set if I am not mistaken . Its an excellent set for travel imo . 

http://www.chessmate.com/chessmate1.html

Yeah, the image is from their site.

What your saying is absolutely true. Switching from 2D to 3D, when your eyes are only used to seeing chess played on a flat computer screen will adversely effect your board vision when playing OTB.

Switch to Chinese Chess. Problem solved.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiangqi

Tell him to get up after making a move to see the board from different angles.  Sometimes watching a video of blitz games will help train the brain to see positions. 

Also, I like to study photos like this.  Figure out what was played and in what order.

My chess vision suffers tremendously OTB. I've played tens of thousands of games but only a dozen or so with a real board (though I own two). It's a big adjustment and I can commiserate with your professor.

lame honestly there is zero difference. I never understand people saying this the pieces are the same.. they're all start on the same squares.. and there is 64 squares whether the pieces or flat or not.. this is just a classic excuse for blunders

No, there is a big difference.  Many people suffer from this problem, and I was one of them for years.  The only way I overcame it was playing with real pieces a lot more.  I try to split my study and analysis time at least evenly between screen and real board to keep the problem from reappearing.  Just because you don't have the problem doesn't mean it isn't real.

This is not correct.  Chess is largely about vision and altering the visual aspect of the game will clearly affect a player's ability to see continuations and tactical ideas.  It won't affect positional play or understanding but this is beside the point.

Since I mostly play online I combat this problem by playing out my longer games on a real board, although I still find I need to look at the board on the screen on try and visualise longer variations.

Tell him to close one eye. 

Chess life

In 1979, in Vietnam, I created a Chinese Chess set with bottle caps and a brown paper bag.

People still do it to this day.