3D Vision Blog

More interesting news coming from GDC 2010 in San Francisco, this time from ATI announcing their Open Stereo 3D Initiative in trying to work with more partners to ensure support for multiple different stereoscopic 3D solutions. The idea of the open initiative is to offer consumers additional choices when selecting an S3D solution, more innovations and of course help in lowering the costs for the hardware and software making it easier for wider adoption. ATI (AMD) and its partners will supposedly soon announce a lineup of 3D products, including a 3D-enabled ATI Eyefinity technology (to counter Nvidia’s 3D Vision Surround), 120Hz 3D-ready displays and notebooks, active shutter glasses and passive polarized ones (have you heard of passive shutter glasses!?), S3D support for DirectX 9, 10 and 11, Quad Buffered OpenGL, Blu-ray 3D support. As you can see from the presentation slide above the 3D-gaming middleware partners are DDD and iZ3D, and for Blu-ray 3D support ArcSoft and CyberLink. ATI is also going to try to work on establishing standards that will help in having compatibility and much wider choices when building your computer and stereo 3D setup if they are adopted by others. The only thing that still remains to be seen is how soon we are going to see actual products on the market as ATI has been talking about S3D support for quite some time, but still no dates when to expect it are available… although we have multiple hints about summer availability.

Nvidia and Epic Games just announced the addition of official support for the stereoscopic 3D technology called 3D Vision in the latest Unreal Engine 3. This announcement means that licensees of the UT3 game engine will be able to take full advantage of integrated 3D Vision support by offering games that not only look great, but also handle very well when played in stereoscopic 3D mode. The best news is that even the popular Unreal Development Kit (UDK), a free version of Unreal Engine 3, will also offer support for 3D Vision. The updated version of Unreal Engine 3 and UDK (the march beta does not include it!) will be available in the near future, allowing games developed with that revision (or later one) to deliver “out of the box” support for 3D Vision. Meanwhile the latest version of UT3 engine with 3D Vision support is being demonstrated at the Game Developers Conference currently held in San Francisco, so if you are interested you can visit and see a demo of the engine in stereoscopic 3D mode. And while the announcement is only about 3D Vision support for the latest UT3 engine it will most likely work without any significant issues with other stereoscopic 3D solutions currently available.

- To visit the official website of the free UDK (the free UT3 engine development kit)…

Here is another stereoscopic 3D video in HD quality showing the forests, waterfalls, caves and beautiful views from mountain Bükk in Hungary. It is not completely new, but it is quite nice and I’ve kind of missed to post it here, so if you still haven’t seen it then you should download and include in your collection of 3D videos. The video is in HD quality and encoded in dualstream WMV format so you need to view it with a player that supports this like the 3D Vision player or the Stereoscopic player. And don’t forget to leave your thoughts about the video in the comments below…

- To download the S3D nature video from Hungary – mirror 1 – mirror 2 – mirror 3