Game Companies Intrigued By 3D Tech 23
An editorial by Rob Fahey looks into the possibility of game companies experimenting with modern 3D technology. Over the past decade, advances in the field have been enough for film studios to give 3D another shot, but significant price-related hurdles remain when considering individual consumers. Quoting:
"[The approach presently favored by game makers] has actually been around for some time. It displays the image for the left eye, then the right eye, in quick succession on screen — while the glasses you wear close LCD 'shutters' over your eyes so that each eye only sees the appropriate image. If this is done fast enough, the brain sees no flicker — just a continuous, steady 3D image. The best thing about this final approach is that some televisions already exist which could, in theory, support it. No new display technology is required, but what you do need is a TV screen which can display twice the number of frames per second as a normal screen — since you now need one frame for each eye, where previously you had one frame for both eyes. You also need LCD glasses synched to the television's refresh rate for each viewer. All of this lies in the realms of being moderately plausible."
low takeup (Score:1)
Developers have always loved it, but the glasses have been fragile and expensive. Might as well wait for 3d tv first, then you'll have cheap glasses. Everyone will get a 3d tv when it comes out, when the software (ie movies, tv show) is available and the price is right.
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Not me, I have no depth perception.
special effects become an issue (Score:4, Interesting)
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Yes.
-:sigma.SB
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A lot of computer game effects - smoke, bloom, etc, are also post-processing effects, and care will need to be taken to make sure that these look correct in a 3D viewing environment.
Yep. The smoke, fire, and (more annoyingly) car glint in GTA: Vice City all render at screen depth. I imagine many postprocessing effects suffer similarly. The HUD for first-person shooters usually renders at screen depth (which is the best place for it to be), but the nVidia stereoscopic driver operates by rendering from two eyepoints equidistant from center, so using the crosshair is like lining up a gunsight to your nose. There was some kind of a workaround where the driver would attempt to render a
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Short answer: yes.
Long answer: As an anecdote, a visual effects artist is adding rain to a shot. With a normal film, this would be a simple matter of compositing. For a 3D film it would be very obvious if every raindrop was on a single plane, so the artist has to analyze the scene to compute depth of field of visible actors/props, and generate 3D rain that doesn't cause cognitive dissonance (a raindrop tha
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last time i saw a serious discussion about this sort of thing, it came up that when you use 3D instead of 2D, alot of special effect break. E.G.It becomes quite obvious that that choreographed punch went behind the other actors head. Will the worry of special/camera effects breaking put tv/film producers off encouraging the leap to 3D?
If this means the actors will have to actually take the punch now, I think I might start enjoying Nicholas Cage movies.
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It's not that hard but it's less predictable and the beancounters would prefer predictable improvements they can plan around. Of course they don't seem to plan around the bit where dev costs are ballooning too fast and revenues can't keep up...
I hope this succeeds (Score:4, Insightful)
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A 120 Hz LCD with a response time of 8 ms would be a lot blurrier than a 60 Hz LCD with a response time of 2 ms.
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The above post doesn't make sense to me.
I just don't see how repeating frames on a CRT increases blurriness.
I also don't see how sampling-and-holding increases blurriness on my hypothetical 0 ms LCD compared to using blank-frame insertion.
Can someone explain this to me?
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Eureka! Thank you. The blur is created by the eye, not the display.
If your eye is following a moving object on a sample-and-hold display, there will be a discrepancy between where your eye expects the object to move to and where the object is displayed on screen. This discrepancy is the blur.
Learning is good.
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Wow, what a brilliant new idea! (Score:3, Interesting)
just saw a 3d movie this weekend (Score:2)