3D Vision Blog

FMX 2010 will be taking place next week between May 04 and May 07 in Stutgart, Germany. The FMX Conference on Animation, Effects, Games and Interactive Media is a European conference on the creation, production and distribution of digital entertainment and interactive visualization in design, industry and research taking place each year. And this year (15th in a row) stereo 3D will be among the more important topics at the conference, so if you are visiting FMX you should not miss the interesting panels about S3D there.

Tuesday and Wednesday next week at FMX will be focused on 3D in movies, there will be a screening of the movie Alice in Wonderland (shot in 2D and converted in 3D). There will be panels about the shooting of 3D video and about the conversion of 2D content to 3D. And Thursday and Friday are probably going to be the more interesting as the panels then will be targeted at gaming in 3D. Neil Schneider, President & CEO of MTBS and Executive Director of The S-3D Gaming Alliance will be talking about the quality expectation needs of consumers and measurable ways that S-3D games can be tested and reviewed by media and customer alike. He will showcase the new M3GA initiative and share some other ideas that are currently being worked out. Andrew Oliver, Co-Founder and CTO of Blitz Games Studios, will talk about stereoscopic 3D console gaming. Blitz is one of the largest independent game developers in the world who has just celebrated their 20th anniversary. Most recently, they have earned their due as being the first game developer to put out a console title on XBOX 360 and PS3 that supports modern stereoscopic 3D solutions (Invincible Tiger: The Legend of Han Tao). Thursday will finish with Samuel Gateau, a member of the Content & Technology Engineering group at NVIDIA. Over the course of two hours, Sam will detail the required techniques for game developers to get the best results out of NVIDIA’s GeForce 3D Vision solution. On Friday Jens Schöbel, Technical Designer for Crytek will talk about their game engine’s use of stereoscopic 3D…

But if you are in Canada, then next week is also going to be interesting for you as GDC Canada 2010 will be taking place in Vancouver on May 6-7th. The Game Developers Conference Canada is a forum for Canadian developers to share best practices for fostering excellence and quality games within their region and distributed globally. And although not so focused on stereo 3D, there are still going to be some interesting panels covering that aspect of gaming, so you may consider visiting them.

Habib Zargarpour, Creative Director for Microsoft Game Studios, and advisory board member for The S-3D Gaming Alliance will have a 1 hour panel called “Stereo-3D Gaming: What Are We Waiting For?” on Thursday. And on Friday you should not miss the 1 hour session with David Coombes (SCEA) and Anton Mikhailov (SCEA) titled “Stereoscopic 3D for the PlayStation3 and Introducing PlayStation Move Motion Controller” that will explain the Stereoscopic 3D strategy taken by Sony Computer Entertainment.

- To see the full schedule for the FMX 2010 conference in Germany…
- To see the full schedule for the Game Developers Conference in Canada…

More and more sports events are getting the 3D treatment and there were just some news that the Australian Channel Nine TV network will be broadcasting the first 3D sports event in Australia (thanks to Philip Heggie for reporting that). They’ll be broadcasting in 3D the first of the three 2010 State of Origin Rugby League games on May 26th, namely the Queensland vs New South Wales (NSW) rugby match. It is interesting to note that the Australian government has temporary given the network an extra broadcasting spectrum for the event, welcoming the initiative, and it will be a terrestrial TV broadcast over the air, and not on cable. Of course in order to be able to watch it in 3D you’ll have to have a compatible 3D-ready TV set and so far the only ones available on the Australian market are the Samsung C7000 series. Sony and Panasonic may also have their 3D-ready HDTVs available on time for the event as they are expected in June, but that is still not clear yet. The 3D broadcast will be in HD 1080i resolution according to the HDMI 1.4 3D specs. The game will be covered by special 3D rigs consisting of two cameras each and there should be at least a few of these in different places along the stadium to cover the whole game, besides the normal 2D cameras that will also be there for the normal broadcast of the event. Unfortunately no news about online broadcast, so the event will kind of remain limited to Australia, but hopefully someone will make a recording and share it with the rest of the world…

Not long ago we had one major sports event in the USA – The 2010 Masters golf tournament in 3D and now there are some interesting news that The 2010 French Open tennis tournament will also be shot and broadcasted in 3D too. The 2010 French Open will run from May 23th to June 6th in Paris, so after it finishes it will be just about time for the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa – the next major sports event to be shot and shown in 3D. These are definitely very good news for all the sports fans all over the world as it seems that the big sports events are one of the first to go 3D in trying to provide you similar experience as actually being there live, but at the same time from the comfort of your home while in front of your new 3D TV. After the Masters 3D broadcasts there were a lot of people that were quite impressed by what they saw, although they were not interested in Golf or even found it quite boring. Tennis for example is also not the most common and widely popular sport, but with the football matches coming up this summer the new generation of 3D TVs should become a big hit.

But back on the topic of the 2010 French Open tennis tournament being shot and broadcasted in 3D, not all matches of course, but all that will be played at the center court at Roland Garros will be shot and broadcasted in 3D. It seems that the organizers of the The 2010 French Open have partnered with Panasonic, Orange and Eurosport to make the 3D broadcasts possible. The 3D broadcast should be available to all Orange subscribers throughout France on special 3D TV channel. Eurosport will also be delivering live 3D coverage of the sports event to thousands of retail stores throughout Europe on Panasonic VT20 Plasma 3D TVs, but it seems not to the homes of the early adopters of 3D TVs that still have some issues with finding content in 3D. Still Panasonic expects to have around one million people that will be able to see the 3D broadcast from the tennis tournament in Europe, which is not bad at all.