As a precursor to the Game Developers Conference, The S-3D Gaming Alliance is very pleased to announce its latest affiliate member:



"We have to keep up with the times, and stereoscopic 3D gaming has a very important present and future. Game developers need a firm grasp of this technology, and this is a great opportunity for them to have a real say in how it moves ahead." - Jodi Bluth, Publisher, Animation Magazine

For those unfamiliar, Animation Magazine has a twenty year history, and covers all aspects of digital animation - including video games. As a special offer to S-3D Gaming Alliance and Meant to be Seen members, Animation Magazine is offering a free annual subscription (10 issues) of their publication in digital form.



Just click on the Animation Magazine banner you see here, and fill in the appropriate information to subscribe. While you must be logged in to MTBS to take advantage of the offer, registration here is both free and instantaneous.



We are also pleased to report that our latest S-3D game review is out. Bioshock was a work of video game art, can Bioshock 2 meet up to the challenge? How does it perform in stereoscopic 3D? Today, we find out! Come back in a few hours because we put together some great video footage. YouTube is temporarily down for maintenance, so we just need to wait for it to clear.

There are more surprises to come. MTBS is going through some heavy maintenance, and some forum features have temporarily stopped working. Smilies, embedded YouTube videos, etc. are examples of this. We want to get some other things out of the way before we fix this. We think you will agree that it was worth the wait when things are complete.

It seems the Game Developers Conference buzz is starting to pour in. Full credit should go to Blitz Games Studios for setting down the gauntlet and announcing S-3D support in their innovative Blitztech game engine. If anyone knew what this engine is capable of, they would freak!

However, not to go unchallenged, Crytek announced their plans to aggressively demonstrate S-3D gaming support with CryENGINE 3 and Crysis 2 at GDC 2010.


Mark Rein, VP and Co-Founder of Epic Games and
Neil Schneider, President & CEO of Meant to be Seen
after SIGGRAPH 2008 UT3 S-3D Demo

The latest is that Epic Games will be doing stereoscopic 3D demonstrations at GDC too! They frame it as a demonstration rather than as native stereoscopic 3D support, so we will try to learn more when we can.

CeBIT has had a series of leading manufacturers showing some innovative stereoscopic 3D products in Germany, and Aiptek earned some headline space for demonstrating one of the most inexpensive S-3D cameras around.



While the summary video is great, the separation shown on the JVC TV is out of whack for sure (not the fault of the camera!).

Our good friend Anton Belev at 3dvision-blog has been doing a great summary of the show from different online sources. You should check it out!


FMX/09: iZ3D (left), Console S-3D (middle), NVIDIA (right)

Speaking of Germany, MTBS and S3DGA are very proud to announce that we will be media partners for the upcoming FMX 2010! In addition to speaking at the event, we are working to develop an updated 3D gaming showcase like we did last year. We want game developers to be very excited about this stuff!

Finally, MTBS is going through some maintenance updates. If you have any problems with the site, or it behaves strangely, let us know.