E3 Preview? Possibly!

[PressBot]

Ok!  Looks like we have our work cut out for us.  E3 is next week, and while there is excitement around Project Natal and PlayStation Move, there is equal if not more anticipation for announcements around stereoscopic 3D gaming!



While I'm sure there will be a few surprises at E3, a great preview of game developer attitudes towards 3D gaming can be found at Gamerlive.TV from their videos of The 3D Gaming Summit.  While we wanted to link to these videos sooner, we wanted to wait until most of them were up.
Read full article...

[DmitryKo]

I took my time to watch a few videos. The realtime demo of the Move controller in the Sony Entertainment panel was absolutely hillarious - hopefully Natal can perform as good as the Move, or Microsoft will be in trouble.

I would like to watch some more, but I just don't have spare 40+ hours to watch all of them Maybe later. I generally like to just read through PowerPoint slides or maybe read the transcripts rather than watch the full videos - it just takes much less time. The slides usually contains all the key points, and very few presenters actually elaborate anything beyond what is presented in the slides; the live discussion format is sure different enough to warrant watching of full live footage though.


I find it interesting that most panelists talked about fundamental issues with the game design, in particular user interface (3D cursor, icons/tags at the depth of the object, transparent GUI, HUD text etc.) and camera setup (pop-out, camera angles, separation and convergence, transitions, etc), as well as game level design and limitations of the older shader hardware. I think many people here at MTBS3D forums tend to underestimate the amount of artistic changes needed for a proper stereo 3D conversion; hear it from the involved parties.

In practice, it means that full S3D support is viable only for projects that are just starting and will be completed in 2-3 years, since developers can take their time to design everyting with stereo 3D in mind right from the start. These games should be designed around D3D10, and should look and play definitely better than current D3D9-era games where stereo support was mostly implemented in a quick and dirty way (some panelists even talked about "native Nvidia 3D vision support" when in reality all they did is correct the most nasty visual issues with the user interface and allow the 3D Vision driver to automatically convert the world for them).


As for all the confusion about separation (3D depth) and convergence (pop-out) levels in the live footage, well I think the comments were entirely legitimate. If you are going to showcase your technology, you need to do it in the best possible way. The panelists should have taken into account the fact that they were going to show their clips on a much larger screen and in a much larger auditoruim than they typically do in their development labs, but it seems like they didn't bother to test the live footage on a big screen. No wonder that it backfired.

The solution is quite easy, both stereo 3D games and "automatic" drivers should just offer some basic settings such as diagonal screen size and distance to the screen, and should allow not only basic computer monitor sizes but also take into account large projection screens and large auditoriums. Hopefully the panelists learned this lesson and will take their time to properly setup the demos in the future.


I don't think this will be a problem at E3 since it's a live floor show and attendees use their own display setups which can be tuned for an optimal depth and separation well before the show.

[phil]

If you are going to showcase your technology, you need to do it in the best possible way. The panelists should have taken into account the fact that they were going to show their clips on a much larger screen and in a much larger auditoruim than they typically do in their development labs, but it seems like they didn't bother to test the live footage on a big screen. No wonder that it backfired.

The solution is quite easy, both stereo 3D games and "automatic" drivers should just offer some basic settings such as diagonal screen size and distance to the screen, and should allow not only basic computer monitor sizes but also take into account large projection screens and large auditoriums.

Yeah absolutely! I remember when we were preparing the first stereo footage of Invincible Tiger for the 3D Entertainment Summit 2008, the first thing we did was ask the organisers to tell us the width of the screen and the viewing distances.

A really important advantage that stereo in games has over films is that, provided you've got the maths right, the stereo adapts to any screen size without affecting the zero-parallax plane or the range of depth (both of which are important variables from an artistic point of view).

Once we'd captured our footage using the appropriate screen width in the settings, we took it to Dolby's labs to test the results on a cinema screen

[Neil]

The following is an excerpt of a blog article.  Read Full Article

Ok!  Looks like we have our work cut out for us.  E3 is next week, and while there is excitement around Project Natal and PlayStation Move, there is equal if not more anticipation for announcements around stereoscopic 3D gaming!

While I'm sure there will be a few surprises at E3, a great preview of game developer attitudes towards 3D gaming can be found at Gamerlive.TV from their videos of The 3D Gaming Summit.  While we wanted to link to these videos sooner, we wanted to wait until most of them were up.