By MARKE ANDREWS, Vancouver Sun

Hoping to discover what 3-D products the market wants and aiming to avoid another VHS-Beta or Blu-ray-HD DVD tech war, major video game and consumer electronics companies are going to the consumer.

The Stereoscopic 3D Gaming Alliance (S3DGA), a non-profit organization, along with major corporations like Electronic Arts, Ubisoft and Panasonic, recently launched the second U-Decide Initiative, a survey to find out what consumers want in 3-D technology and products. The first U-Decide survey, done in late 2008, determined there was an interest in 3-D video-gaming. The new survey seeks specifics. As an incentive, U-Decide offers 50 prizes, the grand prize a Panasonic 3D HDTV.

Some gamers may resist making the 3-D plunge because of the infancy of the industry, and some may be people who bought HD DVD products, only to see Blu-ray take over the high definition DVD market.

Neil Schneider, the Canadian executive director of S3DGA, insists that while standardization of technology is important, so are a lot of other factors when it comes to 3-D gaming.

“We want to find out which experiences gamers are more receptive to,” Schneider said in a telephone interview. “The core members of the S3DGA are game developers and display manufacturers, and we very much want a scenario where when a game goes to a store shelf, it will work equally well on all the different 3-D solutions on the market. A big part of this is quality expectation. When game developers are writing titles, they should know what those visual expectations are so that everyone is on the same page. It’s not just a standardization issue, it’s an artistic issue as well.”

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