3D Gaming*

If all you care about is basic head position and rotation you can do a pretty good job with just a web cam (assuming you can get high enough resolution data fast enough), and it's not even that hard.
If someone is going to be wearing 3D glasses anyway, it's almost trivial.

 

If you really want to use a normal display as a virtual window with realistic parallax for head movement you will only be able to do ~30 degree FOV (unless you can convince people to sit really close to their displays).

 

DLP came up a few times in various 3D Blu-ray articles. The display tech is independent of the underlying format. It should be supported. In fact, Mitsubishi is releasing a 3D adaptor box for DLP TVs to sync with the 3D glasses (may be supporting its own TV brand only).

3D is young. I don't think they want to throw away the early 3D adopters. In fact, the initial base is one of the reasons the 3D vendors are keen to move ahead (existing enthusiastic base, according to the vendors).

You picked the wrong trend to bet on.

Yap, I think Microsoft will have a breakthrough with Natal. The concept is sound. The rest is execution (Just don't lean on speech recognition too much). Stereo 3D + head tracking and other augmented/alternate reality stuff will be interesting to track.

 

Nintendo's take:
http://www.siliconera.com/2010/02/0...to-work-with-graphical-circuits-for-3d-games/

 

3D specs of HDMI 1.4 made public

http://www.blu-ray.com/news/?id=4136

[size=-2]All these people are making frightening progress.[/size]

 

How would that effect the performance and reproduction of content on the console? If they are already taking a hit from CPU performance with Natal, would 3D not also give them an even more significant performance penalty and magnify the already steep 15% CPU runtime loss for Natal?

If they truely want to target 3D + Natal it would make more sense to me to refine the console somewhat to be able to do both at once by increasing the performance of the GPU and giving the console the ability to seamlessly spit out Xbox 360 content in 3D with insignificant developer intervention.

 

At the very least, the Natal cam and the Xbox CPU/GPU should be able to rig the photo taking process to synthesize a 3D picture (from the IR depth info).

As I understand, the rest will depend on rendering techniques. If they can do it on major PS3 games, I am sure it is possible on 360 also. I think the only uncertainty is the HDMI 1.2 (or lesser) output.

EDIT: sebbbi, do you have to turn off the 360's auto-scaler ? Will it work well with auto-scaling 2 slightly different pictures and combine them together in our eyes when the scene is dynamic ?

 

Nah. I never expected PhysX to amount to anything. I was just curious, so I waited for a sale. I figured I can someday give it to my brother, and feel no personal loss. I've secretly wanted PhysX to fail so we can get an efficient, open standard, but that's a subject for another discussion.

 

Hmm... then it's not even bleeding edge, just a waste of money. Early adopters usually dictate the trend *a lot*. The HD movie war would be a good example.

 

Capcom on 3D gaming:
http://www.siliconera.com/2010/02/05/capcoms-comments-on-3d-gaming/

Research scope:

 

Natal + 3D has a problem. it quickly gets as expensive as the console itself.
also Natal is the experience without a controller or add-on you have to carry on yourself, glasses would be an impediment. another factor is glasses won't do 3D blurays on the X360.

so. next time?

 

But it has in several games adding quite some that adds to the immersion. I wouldn't call ~30k dynamic water particles with complex physics and interaction something small in Cryostasis which adds alot to immersion. Not either when it is near 60fps with a GTS250 budget card (standalone). But yeah go open standard but until then it delivers very good stuff for millions of gamers something I cant say about 3D glasses so far from what I've seen.

 

Isn't that weird. Do developers know of this feature and kept under NDA, or were they also in the dark about this feature?

 

They don't need Natal equipments to support 3D gaming right ? Just like we don't need PSEye for playing stereo 3D gaming.

Also, I think Natal is bundled for new customers.

 

Viewing angle should not be an issue with portable gaming though. I mean you hold it with your hand fixedly.

Well I only thought that 3D screens whether OLED or LCD could really be a neat idea for Sony. I hope the internal developers are at least considering the idea.

 

Yes handheld unit does not require wide view angle. Do you really think it's financially impractical? Considering Sony's stance toward 3D standards on the coming years, don't you think maybe Sony is at least considering putting one?

 

Avatar already supports stereo 3d on Xbox 360 and PS3, and it looks really good.

Checkerboard (or odd/even scanline) stereo 3d encoding pattern needs to be pixel precise. Otherwise the TV/projector cannot separate the pixels to both eyes. The TV and projector I have tested support both 720p and 1080p checkerboard input. Naturally if the player has set 1080p mode active in his/her console settings (or the TV only supports stereo 3d with 1080p), your game has to output in 1080p to make the 3d work (as upscaled checkerboard pattern does not work). In Avatar they have handled this by stating it in the 3d stereo settings menu ("set your console resolution to a supported TV 3d resolution"). The game could of course handle this by blitting both 720p eye images to the final 1080p image with a shader that reads every other pixel from different 720p eye texture (but with a standard blit you only get bilinear filtering - hardware scaler produces better upscale quality).

If the TV/projector takes the 3d input in "side by side" encoding, then there is no need to output in the TV/projector native resolution. Hardware scalers work fine for this mode. And this mode doesn't require any fancy combination shader either (just output pixels directly to half horizontal res viewport and change the viewport rectangle for the other eye).

I am not sure what stereo encodings the forthcoming LCD/LED stereo 3d televisions support. I would be really happy if "side by side" encoding was supported, as it requires least extra performance for image combining (odd/even scanline is not that texture cache friendly) and it trasparently supports the hardware scalers in the current consoles.

This is a key point. Currently ps-eye and xbox-vision are only owned by really few players, so it's not commercially viable to support these in AAA games. If a large portion of players have Natal then head tracking using it might be a good solution (depending of performance hit of course). And the head tracking should be trivial to program, as you already have the skeleton constructed (including head position & rotation). With a web camera you have to analyze the picture by your own program code (takes time and money to implement an efficient solution that works really well on various lighting conditions).

The 3d glasses do not help the head position detection at all. Each TV/projector manufacturer glasses have different outlook, and polarized glasses are even completely passive (no communication at all between glasses & TV/projector). The DLP TV and projector systems I have tested all support same stardard interface to connect the glasses IR emitter and there are several glass manufacturers (each having it's own IR emitter technology). So the glass and output device manufacturers are not always even same. The key point here being that the console has no connection and no information of the glasses at all (and it doesn't even know it's outputting stereo 3d signal). The TV set gives the glasses the shutter signal (depending on the connection system used between the TV and glasses).

 

Regardless of what design glasses you have, they should provide a very easy reference point to detect and track. You could also have target LEDs in them for tracking purposes, although you'd need a standardised design for that so different TVs all come with useable specs. Tracking would be no harder than Wii if there were two spots to follow, providng a rough Z position too.

 

Was it 720p or something else ? And what 3D encoding format did they use ? (side by side ?).

I believe side-by-side encoding is supported by HDMI 1.4.

Yes, bundling is critical for Natal and Arc to proliferate.

As Arwin mentioned, head tracking has already been implemented in the PS3 SDK. I believe there are at least 2 forms:
(A) Omega Tracking tracks the head shape and movement (e.g., nodding)
(B) Facial recognition will detect more (e.g., orientation, with or without glasses, estimated age, gender)

If necessary, something small can be clipped on to help tracking. Johnny Lee's IR glasses experiment should be available in the Playstation developer network too. The guy who ported the idea to PS3 said that he made it available there.