I have seen the future of gaming and it is 3D

I have seen the future of gaming and it is 3D





Last night at the IGDA meeting in Leamington Spa I saw a presentation and then a demonstration of 3D gaming from Andrew Oliver and Aaron Allport of Blitz games. Most of us are familiar with old B movie 3D, with cardboard blue and red glasses. Well technology has moved on a long way since then and we are at the cusp of it going mass market.


Just now the movie industry is producing 3D films at an unprecedented rate. Partly because they now can, with digital distribution and digital movie projection. And the TV manufacturing companies are switching to a variety of 3D technologies in their latest models. So there is a groundswell out there and gaming will be a part of it.


Blitz have developed proprietary 3D software that enables 3D games to work on the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. There were a number of hurdles to overcome in the sheer amount of information that needs to be delivered to the screen, so these consoles are being stretched to their absolute limit. It is only with the next generation of consoles that the power will be there to do 3D easily and well across all game genres.


The 3D game I saw was using active glasses and was far more effective than the old coloured lens technology. And the results were deeply impressive. It was like going to the theatre having only previously seen the cinema. The whole experience was vastly more immersive. And as this is one of the things we strive for in gaming Blitz would appear to be on a winner with their technology.


I am told that the journalists who have tried this have written it up very positively but then their readers have responded with very negative comments. This is because you really are in no position to form a judgement on the experience till you have tried it yourself.


Story in original setting with video:
http://www.bruceongames.com/2009/05/15/i-have-seen-the-future-of-gaming-and-it-is-3d/

 

I can't truly see any 3d technology becoming 'mainstream' until they find a way to discard the use of glasses.

Simply put watching a 3d movie without glasses gives me a splitting headache - how can you have a game played in a family setting in the living room by one of the kids with such a limitation?

Even if the tech is as compelling as you indicate its side effects for non-players are too severe for it to reach out from a niche at present imho.

 

I concur, they'll have to create volumetric displays to overcome the dimensionality issues related to the problem. The issue with them now, is they're in their infancy, and projecting a true 3D model into a volumetric display would require throughput current hardware can't handle.

 

Bull.. There ALREADY exists 3d displays that dont need glasses. Without needing to go "fully volumetric"

www.holografika.com

is one of MANY (but has the biggest investors from the likes of disney, etc)

its only a matter of time before these displays hit our homes (just like everyone upgraded to hi-def)

 

I don't know. Most people seem to have bought hi def displays because
they were bigger and not as fat as conventional ones... it benefited everyone
who bought it whether they used hi def or not.

Also, I'm hugely skeptical about the success possibilities of any tech where the
advocates use the expression "you don't know until you've tried it" - especially
where the benefits aren't hugely obvious from a shop window.

I'm sure it's great when you have the glasses on. I'm sure (absolutely positive)
we'll never have a mainstream spec based 3D system, just as I was sure that
head mounted VR would never take off, despite being told that I'd change my mind
once I'd tried it.

Specless is more of a possibility ..but it needs to be introduced along with a slew of
other benefits and it's drawbacks need to be overcome first.

It's not about the technology, it's about the world you're trying to put it in.

 

I concur ..

I got a HDTV because of its size and compactness as much as anything - I was 'hoping' I'd see a difference between SDTV and HDTV, but to be frank I don't on most things.

The television in the living room is HDTV and moving from that on an HDTV channel to the same channel in normal definition in another room is hardly the 'revelation' which many people make it out to be - heck on most programs I can't see ANY difference.

(about the only thing which has blown me away in HD is watching the 'Cars' movie ...)

 

Interesting link - would love to see one in the 'flesh' so to speak though as it sounds rather too good to be true on paper. (any idea whereabouts you can find such a display in the wild - as I'd have expected they'd be on show/used at the larger theme-parks by now if they were THAT good).

(I've read the 'concept' section of the website where they explain how it all works, sounds 'plausible' .... just my natural cynicism is in full swing)

 

about the holographika.
I don't know... the rubicube demo kind of sells it off, it's more 2.5D than 3D.

the cube kind of quash when the camera pan, and it only pan very slightly, which is in itself rather suspicious.

there's no point in having a slightly 3D display, if the only way to see it is to have clear, basic vector-like 3D shape. unless the technology is free to ad on every new screen deployed on the shop floors.

and if the 3d display strecthes the images depending on the angle, then that's probably worse than the screens brightness fading (like we've seen in the past years)... especially if that "stretching" is actually the reason why you paid more.


the 3D (as in 3d movie) we are talking about requires glass, yes, but also propose far larger "Z- Range" than the holographika. and really, there would be no point in a 3D movie if it was about "look, if you shift your head 3 foot aside, you'll see the cube alter shape slightly"

 

well come on, it's still early days... At least with holografika, you CAN move your head to the side and see it from different angles (which is a HELL of a lot more 3d than the tv with 3d glasses?), and the object DOES properly float in the air. I find it interesting to see their list of investors - i'd imagine disney plan to use it for one of their themeparks...

But yes, you're right - it doesnt work from ALL angles, and if you look at it from more than 30 degrees to the left/right the image breaks up quite nastily.

And there's other companies doing 3d tv without the need of glasses too. Most seem to be adopting the approach of giving us the same steroscopic image that you get from 3d glasses - without the need of 3d glasses. So not as clever as holografika (shit that name is hard to type), but still a step up from glasses.

Hell there's even one (which is the most easiest for film makers to use) where the 3d effect is gotten by giving a 2d image a greyscale depth buffer in real time. But again, you wouldnt be able to "look around" it.

 

If I understand the principle correctly, it basically acts as its own wrapper around a standard rendering mechanism, openGL. It even states that it sends the information provided through the wrapper to a rendering cluster, which implies that it takes the central viewpoint (straight on) and likely selects specialized points relative to the '3D' experience that it provides. This is probably doubled by the statement which implies that it's like a window, and you're looking from various 'points'. They also explain that the 3D voxels use the primary colors shot from different angles, which would lead you to believe that if you had non-3D elements on one composite image, they wouldn't be visible at all angles, and even give rise to a 3D sticker effect where you see parts of two images, which is observed in text on one composite image through this video on their website at ~1:13.

Because of this, you can almost expect that it'll be suspiciously flat at extreme viewing angles. This isn't really something that can be fixed given the still mostly two-dimensional surface of the display (the screen is concave, it seems, which makes sense, better to give the side-surface area for 3D surface rendering). The reason I mentioned volumetric displays is their very nature implies that there's no surface to be had, it would be free standing (or floating?), and 'viewing angle' would be ~360². I noticed a lot of left-right pans on the HoloVizio, but none up-down; though, it's a step in the right direction.

 

I saw a '3D' tv in Harrods a few months back. It just looked like a normal TV, and required no glasses, but it created a 3D image. Unfortunately it looked absolutely awful as it flickered like crazy, presumably to shoot the different colours/parts of the image into the eye at different times.
However, you could see the potential.

 

Display technology is moving over to OLED.
You will soon be throwing away your obsolete LCD televisions.
I have even written articles about this.

Oled dispays are incredibly thin because they are just printed. So it is very easy to layer them and get true 3D.
Another thing I have written about.

 

And So It Is Written.

 

I was impressed with OLED, it produced the kind of display I had hoped from High-def
LCD, but was disappointed not to get. I feel a little bit better about not wholly embracing
high-def yet... (Got the telly, but no high-def reception or disc players)

 

There are several drawbacks to colour LCD displays:

• They are very complex, with polarisers, filters, backlights etc which make them very expensive to produce.
• Most of the light produced by the display is absorbed within the display, this makes them very inefficient users of energy. With mobile devices they are the main limit of battery life.
• The fundamentals of the technology produce a narrow viewing angle.
• LCDs switch relatively slowly so are not very good at displaying motion.
• They cannot display black, which reduces picture quality enormously.
• As many people have discovered they are fragile and easily broken.

LCD displays have become the TVs of choice because they have big screens which are thin and thus easy to live with in a domestic environment. Most users are not critical enough to be bothered by the poor picture quality.
I still use a CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) television because it is better. My Philips 36PW9525 has a picture quality that puts any LCD television to shame. It does, however, need three people to pick it up.
But both LCD and CRT technologies are in the process of being made obsolete. There is a display technology being introduced that is vastly superior to both in every way. It is called OLED and it works by semiconductor emissive electroluminescence. The advantages are startling:

• Manufactured by a lithographic process, the screen is literally printed. This will, ultimately, make them very cheap to produce.
• The incredibly simple construction makes them very light, a fraction of the weight of an LCD. Also they are extremely robust. And only a few millimetres thick.
• Nearly all the energy is turned into the light that you see, this is incredible energy efficiency and will revolutionise portable devices.
• Black really is black because no light is being produced. This massively improves picture quality.
• Better colors, brightness, contrast and viewing angle than LCD.
• Switch very fast (0.01ms) compared with LCD (2.0ms) so can display motion vastly better.
• They can be made curved and they can be made out of flexible materials. You could even make clothes out of them!

As you can see OLED confers massive advantages, the main problem is in productionising the technology. They are starting with small screens, just as LCD did, and then gradually working their way up. But already they can be found in a number of production devices. The Zune HD and Samsung i7500 for instance, in the world of gaming. Soon they will be in iPods and iPhones, which will really bring them to the public’s attention.
So every LCD device will become obsolete, the features and benefits of OLED devices will be so overwhelmingly superior. And games will look so much better.

 

Sony have a 13" OLED tele, it looks fantastic....but fuck me, $3K for that thing?

It'll have to pick up a lot more momentum to drive the prices down and it'll have to drive them down a lot to entice people who've spend thousands on new HD teles of late as this product cycle has come about way to quickly...

 

Large OLED is a way out yet. Current applications are all portable device scale. Mobile phones mostly. Meanwhile LED backlit LCD is available, oh, umm, now-ish?

 

I want this.

 

I'm still holding out for my jet-pack.

 

Samsung are leading. Here is a video of a 50+ inch OLED TV. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WQBD_Rn3Wk And they have a range of OLED TVs coming next year.

OLED will eventually be a lot cheaper than LCD because the production process is so simple. The display is, quite simply, printed. And the picture quality is immensely better than the dire LCD TVs that are currently so popular.