3D Gaming*

... but will it work ? If it works and is cheap enough, I don't really care whether the tech is interesting or not.
 
IMO the horizontal resolution is unlikely to be high enough that it will look good in between sweet spots or from the wrong distance ... so I don't really see the point. If it's going to have sweet spots any way I'd rather have a single sweetspot and a cheaper display.
 
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... but will it work ?
I have on my desk a lenticular 3D sticker from a Kinder egg. If you view it from a distance, the 3D effect becomes much flatter. Up close and the 3D effect is pretty good but you see the stripes. And viewed from some 40ish degrees either side, the 3D becomes inverted so the...hippo?...on the left appears in front of the hippo on the right. I can see it working for a handheld, but not a full sized set. Maybe a monitor. A glasses-free 3D monitor where I've got my Sammy wouldn't be bad actually, if 3D's any good.
 
I have no interest at all in no-glasses sets outside of handhelds, its just not going to work well enough. Yes having to wear glasses isnt ideal but its the best solution for the forseeable future. They just need to improve the glasses making them lighter and let more light through, and make the screens brighter, they should spend thier time and effort hear. The first attempt is pretty good already and i expect things to improve massively in the next few years.

The con of having to wear glasses is far better than the cons of any auto-stereoscopic display tech we have ever seen, and i dont expect any great new ideas in the near future to change this, people have been thinking about these things for decades already.

About the only thing i can think of working is some type of dynamic parallax barrier coupled with multiple user face tracking to detect the position and distance of each viewer and modify the barrier accordingly.
 
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What's in the Avatar Blu-ray TV ad ?

This release does not have 3D support. The one in November may have it.

According to James Cameron we won't be seeing a 3d Avatar Blu-Ray anytime soon. The November release will just add a ton of extra features, a slightly extended version of the movie (6 additional minutes) plus a slightly different cut with 30 minutes worth additional, but unfinished scenes. (not really interested in that feature personally. The Spirits Within had a similar feature, and watching raw and unshaded polygons acting just stops being interesting past the first 5 minutes.)

The Avatar Blu-Ray looks absolutely glorious by the way. The added clarity, brightness and richness of the 2d presentation (which, unlike the 2.35:1 aspect ration in theaters, is Open Matte and hence fills the entire screen) easily makes up for the loss of depth (which didn't really impress me a whole lot in theaters anyway)
 
I'm wondering why most of the 3d TVs are LCDs. Wouldn't Plasmas be a much better choice? With response times far below 0.1 milliseconds, synchronization should be way easie, and you could leave the shutters open for far longer. At least the 120Hz LCD PC monitors are operating way past their limitations at the moment: the colors of the pixels visibly overshoot to achieve the fast refresh rates, particularly in very bright areas. White effectively becomes pink on my Syncmaster.

Past a certain size Plasmas are also tend to be quite a bit cheaper than LCDs (and I consider size to be rather important for immersive 3d)
 
Id imagine its because they all want to leverage their existing investments so moving to 3D is incredibly cheap for them.

Companies like panasonic who have put continued investment in plasma sets are releasing 3D sets. Once/if 3D takes off id expect companies to move away from LCD if it is considerably inferior and thus are losing more money than they would by going in a new direction.

Personally i want a rear projection DLP set but you cant get hold of any outside of US. Mitsubishi have just anounced thier new 3D RPTVs, they are going to be selling a 73" set for around $1500. The new LaserVue sets are supposed to look amazing also, they use Lasers instead of the LED bulbs which apparently gives amazing picture quality on par with CRT and allows for much slimmer sets.
 
Siegfried, I thought so too about plasmas ... but in retrospect with scanning backlights the response time of the LCD really doesn't matter that much ... only problem is that since the backlight is only on a fraction of the time you need a lot more peak LED power.

It's a pity the thin thinner thinnest crowd is killing DLP in displays ... it's such a powerful technology.

PS. plasma is 15 bit colour with dithering in 3D AFAIK (it's still 600 Hz subfields, which is not enough for 24 bit colour).
 
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PS. plasma is 15 bit colour with dithering in 3D AFAIK (it's still 600 Hz subfields, which is not enough for 24 bit colour).

Really? Didn't know that. I just bought one, by the way. Loving it to death. Makes the images of my old LCD TV (which, to be fair, was never a top of the line model) look like complete and utter garbage.
 
At 600 Hz subfields and 120 Hz framerate there are 5 subfields per frame, so 5 bits of gradation per colour component.
 
http://www.siliconera.com/2010/04/29/statistics-on-3d-gaming-interest/

The CEA, you know the company that produces the Consumer Electronics Show, conducted a study on the interest of 3D gaming and announced the results at the LA Games Conference.

Here’s what they found out.

1 in 4 interested in home 3D video game experience.

1 in 2 people who saw a 3D movie in the last 12 months are interested in playing 3D games at home.

1 in 5 say playing video games in 3D would be their primary reason for buying a 3DTV.
 
Combining these three seems to indicate that interest levels are currently not very high yet. But that's not a big surprise - my wife subscribes to an independent consumer magazine that helps choose all sorts of products and with the upcoming soccer championships, which for many means buy-a-new-TV-and-go-digital-time, they've reviewed HD tvs and digital receivers, and no mention of 3D coming up whatsoever, even if most of the championship is actually going to be shot in 3D.

A lot is going to happen though between now and January 2011, and I'm very interested in seeing what the results will be by that time.
 
Those survey results can only be used as a loose reference. Consumers react differently when they are asked to pay out of their wallet vs spewing random opinions.
 
Some movie people are apprehensive about 3-D:

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/movies/la-ca-3ddirector-20100425,0,3797738.story

They have good reason to fear what the hacks will do but as far as smaller type movies I think the key will be the camera moving thru the scene just as we move thru real life.

Btw, this was an interesting tidbit:

"3-D continues to speak to the elimination of the middle creatively," says Justin Marks, the writer on Disney's former "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" project and Sony's action film "Shadow of the Colossus."

Shadow of the Colossus, the movie?
 
Some movie people are apprehensive about 3-D
As long as it kills shaky cam I'll take any side effects in stride ... so precious to hear mention of Michael Bay when people talk about not making good use of the medium ... the guy wastes millions on CGI and then shakes and blurs it into garbage (Transformers).
 
1. IT'S THE WASTE OF A DIMENSION.
When you look at a 2-D movie, it's already in 3-D as far as your mind is concerned. When you see Lawrence of Arabia growing from a speck as he rides toward you across the desert, are you thinking, "Look how slowly he grows against the horizon"? Our minds use the principle of perspective to provide the third dimension. Adding one artificially can make the illusion less convincing.

2. IT ADDS NOTHING TO THE EXPERIENCE.
Recall the greatest moviegoing experiences of your lifetime. Did they "need" 3-D? A great film completely engages our imaginations. What would Fargogain in 3-D? Precious? Casablanca?

Okay, I disagree ... but if that's really his opinion I can see where he is coming from, matter of taste ... then on the second page ...

The second-highest all-time grosser is Cameron's Titanic, which of course was in 2-D. Still, Avatar used 3-D very effectively. I loved it. Cameron is a technical genius who planned his film for 3-D from the ground up and spent $250 million getting it right.

Wait ... what???
 
Coraline had much more thinking behind the 3d than avatar.
And 3d adds a lot in movies where 3d is fully part of the visual grammar (not very often yet)
And for games it adds even a lot more if done right.
 
Okay, I disagree ... but if that's really his opinion I can see where he is coming from, matter of taste ... then on the second page ...

Wait ... what???

Ebert also thinks that video game cannot and will never be art. :oops:

He seems to have a very narrow (utilitarian) view of new media. I haven't heard him complain about the web, so at least he's not tech-phobia. Some of his complains about 3D technology limitations are valid. But I won't put too much stock into his opinion about how 3D tech should, or should not be used.

Coraline had much more thinking behind the 3d than avatar.
And 3d adds a lot in movies where 3d is fully part of the visual grammar (not very often yet)
And for games it adds even a lot more if done right.

Yap, I like Coraline. Am keen to look at an updated 3D version, as opposed to Anaglyph 3D.
 
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