3D Vision Blog

You can say that the last two months were a bit slow when talking about new game releases, after Bad Company 2, Metro 2033 and Just Cause 2 being released we did not get any more new and interesting major game titles. And this is a part of the reason why lately there was not too much about games in stereo 3D mode here in the blog, apart from me not having that much time to play games or not having even older interesting games to play with in S3D mode. Anyway, this is about to change, because it the next two months we are going to have 4 major games available and all of these would benefit a lot from good stereo 3D compatibility, so I would watch for thee titles. Of course they are not officially 3D Vision-ready or anything to give us hints about good stereo 3D compatibility, so we’ll have to wait a bit more and try them out. I also went back to look for some interesting titles in the last few years, so you can expect about that very that soon, but now lets get back to the upcoming interesting games…

Split Second is an intense action-racing game set within a global reality television show. Competitors vie to be the first to the finish line in a made-for-TV city set rigged to blow with the ultimate goal of becoming the season champion. Players in Split/Second don’t just collide with other vehicles to knock them from the track, but can also trigger devastating events and epic Hollywood-style explosions to take out your opponents and drastically alter the dynamics of the race. Being fast is not enough as players must use strategy and pinpoint timing to obliterate huge structures and towering TV set pieces to tactically alter the track or create entirely new routes. The game is going to be officially released tomorrow…

Blur is another racing title expected to be released later this month on May 25th. Inside the game players assume the role of an up-and-coming racer who is looking to make a name for himself in the underground racing scene, but the competition is fierce. As you take on the series of races, you’ll meet a bunch of recurring characters. Some of these characters will be rivals, others perhaps will act as mentors, and some may be something else entirely. The only thing that is certain in the world of Blur is that in a race there are winners and losers, and racers will do anything to reach the finish line first.

Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands is a new action-adventure game to be released on June 8th. In it you’ll journey to a land of legendary combat and mysterious circumstances in this new installment to the Prince of Persia: Sands of Time franchise. Prepare yourself for impossible battles and know that you will come face to face with death as you engage in deadly combat. Experience many of your favorite elements from the original series as well as new gameplay innovations. The mystery and magic of the old-as-time fight between good and evil comes to life with all its rewards and consequences in Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands.

All Points Bulletin is a new breed of an action online game expected to be available on July 2nd. The action is set in a persistent living, breathing open-world urban environment where fame and fortune awaits all players. Some players will achieve this by feeding on the city, its people and its businesses – the Criminals. Some will live by a higher code and instead feed on the criminals and their organizations – the Enforcers. This dynamic where players become the core content for other players is one of the many unique features of APB. Its deep, rich customization system provides players with the ability to completely personalize their identity. Looks, clothing, vehicles and even music, all to astonishing detail and quality.

When exactly it all begins, nobody can tell you that, but we can pretty much consider that the beginning of stereoscopy dates back to probably around the 300th year B.C., which is he time the Greek mathematician Euclid found out how we humans achieve the depth perception of the world around us (this is the earliest time we have a record of that being discovered). His findings revealed that the depth we perceive is achieved because of the fact that our eyes simultaneously receive two almost exact images, but with a little bit of difference in the perspective and then our brain fuses these two images into one picture with depth. Of course this was just the start, as understanding how our eyes work is very important first step, but a lot more is required to take advantage of that knowledge for the entertainment purposes we use it nowadays. After going back so long time ago, we make a big jump in time to era of the Renaissance, at which time there was also a lot of development about the illusion of depth and how it can be achieved with the help of drawings and paintings. You’ve heard about Leonardo and how he achieved great things back in that time, and he was not the only artist taking advantage of the accumulated knowledge of how we perceive things with our eyes. But actually until the year 1838-39 and the work of the English scientist Charles Wheatstone you can say that things were still developing a bit slow for actually taking advantage of the stereoscopic effect. The pace has quickly started to pick up at that time, when he patented and demonstrated his pioneer work in the stereoscopic 3D field – namely his Stereoscope device. Wheatstone has started working a few years before that on a device that he called a reflecting stereoscope or just a stereoscope – a device that allowed two different drawings to be simultaneously viewed by each eye and thus the illusion of real depth was being achieved. Back at that time they still used two drawings with a little bit different perspective and two mirrors to reflect them and position the two images, so that the viewer can simultaneously see them with his eyes. But even that seemed as a significant development and was quite impressive for the people living back at that time.

Some years later, but still during the 19th century, the stereoscope was further developed and improved and with the photography starting to gain a lot of interest among the general public, the first stereoscopic cameras were being created. Around 1850 was the first period in time when the stereoscopic photography has gained a lot of interest and thanks to that a lot of people had stereoscopes to view such photographs at home (the drawings were replaced with black and white photos). At that time the anaglyph stereoscopic process has also been discovered and in the 1850s the first anaglyph images and anaglyph glasses (red-green filters at first) using different color filters were developed. But of course the anaglyph process has been designed and used to view black and white photographs and not color ones, as the color photos had to wait a few more decades before becoming available. And I’m sure that you probably thought the anaglyph stereoscopic 3D is a fairly new technology, but in fact it is really old concept that is still being taken advantage of. So yet again we skip a few more years in the history until the 1890s, when the interest in stereoscopy has started to boom thanks to the work being done on the first anaglyphic stereo 3D movies (still black and white of course) and that has continued into the early 20th century. The next big moment for stereoscopy, we are still talking about movies as they were the main driving force for stereoscopic development at that time, was in 1950s. New and improved stereoscopic cameras were being developed for stereo photography at that time, and the first solutions using polarization filters (thank Polaroid for that) allowed full color reproduction with depth perception, thus becoming somewhat the preferred method later on, instead of using the older anaglyph method, but still anaglyph did not die…

One major milestone of that time was the release of a 3D movie called Bwana Devil, released in 1952, that has managed to perform quite well and thus attract the attention in Hollywood to 3D once again (some people consider the 50s to be like a Renaissance for 3D and say that we are now repeating that 3D Renaissance). But at that time the movie industry also had to find something new to fight with the appearance of TVs at home, believing that this could greatly hurt the movie industry. So the 3D movies were considered one of the new things to come in cinema, yet again, although unfortunately they did not manage to make 3D so popular there were quite a lot of movies produced in 3D in the 50s. The reasons for that were the problems and additional costs that were introduced when shooting the movie in 3D, doing the post-processing in 3D and then when projecting it in 3D at the cinema and as there were also synchronization problems between the two projectors showing the image and various other issues, so the resulting 3D experience for the viewers was not always the best. Then another comeback in the 80s and with IMAX introducing its first 3D system, things for stereoscopic 3D yet again started to heat up, but still not a lot of hit movies were produced in stereoscopic format which was a serious problem. The major issues with stereo 3D movies getting the attention they deserved and of course becoming mainstream was still the cost of production of a movie in 3D and then the additional cost for equipping a movie theater with a system capable of reproducing that 3D image to the viewers. Not to mention that when talking about 3D movies in the early second half of the 20th century, most of them relied on the so called “cheap” 3D tricks to impress the audience using a lot of scenes where objects seemed to fly right in the faces of the viewers, and other than that did not offer much depth to the world projected on the screen. You should be clearly aware of the fact that a 3D movie is not just a 2D movie that was shot with a two cameras instead of one or the same 2D movie with added just some “cheap” tricks on top of the 2D image. A 3D movie is much more, and that is precisely why not all 3D movies are good in the end and also is the reason why 2D to 3D conversions when not properly executed may as well turn out quite bad.

But back on the “history lesson”, you can say that the next big thing about stereoscopic 3D started in the mid 90s of the 20th century, at a time when personal computers started to get a lot of interest especially for gaming, because of the 3D graphics they offered was getting better and more realistic. Back at that time everyone was talking about virtual reality in different forms and there were some companies interested in making stereoscopic 3D games, allowing the gamers to actually have the perception of true depth while they played. This however proved to be a difficult task, but things started to change at the end of 1998, when a company called Metabyte has announced their first stereoscopic 3D gaming solution called Wicked3D. What they did was to provide not only a hardware in the form of active shutter glasses (allowing the user to see different consecutive frames with each of his eyes), but also releasing an universal, so to say, driver that could transform hundreds of normal 3D games into stereoscopic 3D games. Prior to that solution, every game developer had to work out some sort of a stereoscopic 3D support for his own game and with the Wicked3D that was no longer needed. Originally all 3D games do have most of the needed information for being displayed in stereoscopic 3D, as there is all the needed depth information, what was lacking was the software that will allow the graphics in the game to be rendered twice with a little difference in the perspective, so that when perceived by the user the depth effect will be present. At that time you had to use CRT display with a high refresh rate, because by using active shutter glasses you need to show twice as much frames on the screen as you’d normally do and the job of the glasses is to separate them for each eye. A monitor capable of at least 85Hz, preferably 100Hz was required in order to have 40-50 frames per eye with no noticeable flickering, as this is a bad side effect when quickly making one lens of the glasses dark and then switching it to the other. This is the exact principle that the shutter glasses use in order to achieve stereoscopic 3D depth effect with a single display and not with two separate small displays as the most advanced head mounted display solutions use. The things continued to develop further in the next few years as the graphic processor producer Nvidia has developed a serious interest into stereoscopic 3D gaming and in turn acquired the team responsible for Wicked3D that was working at Metabyte…

Nowadays everyone is talking about stereo 3D and it seems that finally it is about time for the technology to become mainstream and everybody to have some sort of 3D solution available at home, and not to see 3D movies just at the cinema anymore, but also to be able to enjoy all kinds of stereo 3D content at home. Of course it will take at least a few more years in order for the different stereo 3D solutions to become widely adopted and become a common thing in our everyday life, but the good thing is that we are seeing a lot of efforts being put to promote the technology. And although we already have quite a lot of products on the market and more are soon to become available, we still have some issues regarding interoperability and of course the lack of a lot of content in 3D. But in order for you to better understand what problems we are currently facing in 3D technology and the already available implementations we should go back at the beginning of this century and take a look at what happened in the last 10 years.

Let’s get back to the part where Nvidia started to develop their interest in stereo 3D technology, especially for PC gaming, and thus acquiring the team that worked on the Wicked3D product over at Metabyte. Somewhere around 2001 Nvidia already had an additional stereo 3D driver of their own to go along with the Detonator and later Forceware graphical drivers, designed for the company’s GPUs. The stereo 3D driver had to be installed after the GPU driver, in order for the additional functionality to support anaglyph and page flipping stereo 3D output to be available as an option. These drivers worked for the TNT, TNT2 and Vanta as well as GeForce, GeForce 2 and 3 GPUs, and of course the professional Quadro graphic solutions, being made by Nvidia back at around that time. It is interesting to note that even back then Nvidia was thinking about the use of stereo 3D not only for gaming, but also in the professional field for users that needed to have more realistic 3D visualizations in their workflow. And now, years later that way of thinking still haven’t changed as with its new 3D Vision product Nvidia still supports both the consumer GeForce and the professional Quadro users in their need for stereo 3D visualizations. In time Nvidia continued to improve the support of their drivers and even added support for additional hardware like HMD devices (Head Mounted Displays) and in the following few years the Nvidia stereo 3D driver became the most used and relied on solution for different type of products that supported stereo 3D visualizations. So you could not only use the cheap paper anaglyph red-cyan glasses on your normal monitor (CRT displays at that time) or a pair of more expensive LC (Liquid Crystal) shutter glasses that also worked with CRT monitors, but required higher refresh rate models to function without noticeable flickering, but also a 3D HMD device or other exotic solution too. At that time Nvidia had no competition in the area of stereo 3D for gaming and the PC gaming was booming with a lot of interest in further development of the immersion while playing games. But then again stereo 3D was still far from becoming a mainstream technology and was still more like an enthusiasts and early adopters thing.

Now if you think back about displays and how they developed in the last 10 years or so you’ll immediately think of the evolution of going from the big and bulky CRT monitors to the more compact LCD displays. You can say that on the desktop segment this has started somewhere around 2001, but at first the prices of the LCD monitors were quite high and they had some issues and were not performing as good as CRTs in a lot of aspects. But just one year later and the LCD display prices have dropped in half and while they were still quite expensive, they were getting more and more attention from the customers. The technology behind LCD monitors was also quickly catching up, while the prices were going down, so in just a few more years the LCD monitors were starting to replace more and more the old CRT technology. And if you are wondering why that is important, then you should be aware of the fact that the first major push of having better stereo 3D experience (better than the anaglyph solutions that were available for years) using liquid crystal shutter glasses has relied heavily on the technology behind the way CRT monitors have worked and especially their ability to function with higher refresh rates like 100Hz or even more. With the LCD monitors running at only 60Hz this has become a problem that lasted for a few years and just recently we had the first 120Hz LCD monitor on the market by Samsung and after that followed by ViewSonic, Acer and Alienware with more to soon follow… companies like LG and Asus are quickly catching up the new wave.

But because of the LCD monitors starting their “invasion” in around 2004-2007, Nvidia kind of left off the support for stereo 3D as the interest in the technology has also gone down, or so it seemed to the normal users. There were no updates for the stereo 3D drivers for quite some time and the new GPUs and technologies like multi-core CPUs were not supported by the old drivers and the company was being silent about S3D. That kind of disappointed a lot of the enthusiasts that had a bit more specific and actually quite expensive hardware like 3D-capable HMDs that cost them hundreds and even thousands of dollars to buy, as they were no longer usable in stereo 3D mode, although they still worked as normal 2D displays. But in reality Nvidia was kind of busy working on alternative solution, in order to offer yet again the option of stereoscopic 3D gaming with the new hardware available and on an LCD monitor. The results of that work were announced in 2008 with the introduction of their partnership with Zalman and their Trimon series of passive polarized stereoscopic 3D monitors. But at about that time (around 2007) other companies were also starting to work on providing the users with stereoscopic 3D solutions, mainly targeted at gaming, but also supporting videos and photos in 3D format and these are iZ3D and DDD (Dynamic Digital Depth). iZ3D has introduced their own unique approach by creating a specific dual LCD panel monitor with stereo 3D support and the software to go with it, but their driver was even further developed to offer support for other 3D solutions too. DDD and their TriDef solution was more targeted at passive polarized solutions, but has also been expanded to support other stereo 3D setups. And later in 2008 Nvidia had another interesting announcement, this time of their new product called GeForce 3D Vision, that was actually a pair of LC shutter glasses capable of working with the new 120Hz LCD monitor announced by Samsung and also of course with CRT displays and even with the 3D-capable 120Hz DLP projectors and 3D-ready DLP TVs. It seemed that Nvidia foresaw the growing interest in stereo 3D and was starting to push the technology more seriously even before the movie Avatar made its huge success and thus really helped in jumpstarting the interest in stereo 3D on a worldwide level. In 2009 AMD (ATI) has also started talking more seriously about stereo 3D, although they were partnering kind of “silently” with companies like iZ3D even before that. You should be aware of the fact that the Nvidia stereo 3D solutions are designed to work only on the company’s GPUs, whereas the solutions provided by iZ3D and DDD are multifunctional, meaning that then can work on both Nvidia and AMD (ATI) hardware and why not even others.

In 2009 everyone was talking a lot about the bright future of the stereo 3D technologies and solutions, more and more companies were starting to get interested in it and were working hard to prepare different products. On the 3D-capable TV market the company Mitsubishi has been the pioneer and already offering a big portfolio of 3D-ready DLP HDTVs and continuing to improve and develop their product line, and other brands like Samsung for example just kind of trying out with one or two products to test the market. But the real boom in the interest about “everything 3D” was going on around the 3D movie by James Cameron called Avatar and when it finally premiered in cinemas in December 2009 it immediately became a huge hit. Then after that during CES 2010 at the beginning of 2010 it was almost all about 3D technology with a lot of companies showing their upcoming next generation of 3D-capable TV sets, talking about the future of in-home 3D with Blu-ray 3D and so on. And now, with some of the first 3D HDTV and Blu-ray 3D products already on the market and more expected in the summer we are facing one serious issue, which was kind of expected all along. We already have 3D-capable hardware and more is soon to come, but we are still lacking the more important component and that one is the 3D content to see on this new hardware. This is the reason why some companies like Sony for example are not in a hurry to have their 3D-ready HDTVs on the market, as they want not only to have the hardware ready, but to also provide some 3D content to watch on it.

Back to the PC and the games available for it, we already know that they are actually a quite important factor when we are talking about 3D content as they are quite ready to be played in stereo 3D mode. So you see, actually on the PC we already do have a lot of 3D content available – almost all of the games are quite capable to be transformed and displayed in stereo 3D mode with the right software solution like 3D Vision, iZ3D or DDD TriDef. And on a computer that has some sort of a stereo 3D setup you do have a lot of content available in terms of games and you can enjoy it even at this very moment, so the question that arises here is why not play the same content on the 3D HDTV? Well, here comes the other issue, although the new wave of 3D-capable TV sets relies on the HDMI 1.4(a) specification and more specifically the stereo 3D features defined in it, there are still a lot of things left non-standardized. So at this time you still cannot easily connect your computer to the new 3D-ready TV and play 3D content on it from the PC. This kind of sounds stupid, right? I mean you would expect to be able to take advantage of the most widely available stereo 3D content you currently have (the computer games), but in the end you still can’t. However Nvidia is already working on a solution called 3DTV Play, which will allow people to connect their PCs to their new 3D TV sets over HDMI and play games on the big screen in stereo 3D mode. The 3DTV Play software is expected to be available pretty soon, and I suppose other companies will soon follow in Nvidia’s footsteps to also provide some sort of solution for this issue. So are we finally in for a bright future for stereo 3D or not, the time can only tell, but at least it will be quite interesting to observe how things develop in the coming months and years for 3D.

And in the end to try to summarize things a bit and to try to explain why now may finally be the right time for the 3D to stay and become a mainstream product for everyone – at home, on the move, in the cinema and just about everywhere where there is need for it. First of all the digital technology that we currently have allows us to have all kinds of 3D content and the means to display it on different devices in an easy and not so expensive way (as the technologies become more and more common and widely adopted the prices will drop, making 3D even more affordable). Of course we need to have 3D content to watch and this is still somewhat of a problem, but things are also greatly improving and more and more stereo 3D content will soon be available. And we already have a lot of games on the PC that can be played in stereo 3D mode which greatly helps, but we also need movies and live broadcasts of different events done in 3D and we need them done right! You should be well aware of the fact that the stereo 3D technology is just that – a technology giving us a means to record and display some content in stereo, creating the feeling of real volume. But we need that technology applied right in order to create a more believable virtual world inside a game or a movie, or to actually “put us” in the front row of a sports stadium and so on. We don’t need “cheap” 3D tricks to briefly impress us, but at the same time giving us stupid story in a movie or providing a flat and uncomfortable 3D experience and at the same time trying to convince us how great it actually is. If you don’t have a story that can benefit form 3D in a movie, then there is no point in making the movie in 3D and the same goes live broadcasts of sport events and all other things that somebody might think will look cool in 3D. If you are going to produce stereo 3D content that people will like, you need to produce it right, otherwise we might yet again waste the opportunity of the 3D technology becoming widely adopted and wait for some more years.

- Also feel free to discus the above text in our new 3D Forum…

Recently there are some interesting hings happening around Nvidia’s 3D Vision solution for stereoscopic 3D gaming and movie and photo viewing, so here is what is new in brief…

You know that the game Dark Void has been out for a few days already and it is the latest title to support PhysX and 3D Vision, however the profile in the 3D Vision drivers rates the game as Good and not Excellent as you’d expect from an official (?) 3D Vision title. The game has been developed by Capcom, the same guys that made the Resident Evil 5 – the first official 3D Vision-optimized title that came out (the PC version only).

Some of the issues that Dark Void has are due to the use of Unreal engine ant it is not handling perfectly well in stereoscopic 3D mode, so basically most of the games based on it have some issues that need to be fixed afterwards. A good example for a game that is also based on the same Unreal engine, but has been constantly improved to offer good stereoscopic 3D support for 3D Vision is Borderlands. The developers from Gearbox have been constantly improving the 3D Vision support and they just released a new patch version 1.21 that adds 3D crosshair in the game instead of the 2D one when playing in S3D mode.

After five days or exactly on February 9th the game Bioshock 2 should become available. And this is supposedly to be another 3D Vision-ready title and if you ask me is much more interesting and can look really great in stereoscopic 3D mode if it is done right. And especially after the success of the first BioShock, everyone is expecting a lot from the sequel.

Another interesting game title expected next month, March 16th is Metro 2033. This game is supposed to be something like a post-apocalyptic FPS with some RPG elements, with the action going on underground in the Russian Metro, the year is 2033 and what is left of the humanity is just trying to survive in the harsh post-apocalyptic world. This game should support DirectX 10, take advantage of PhysX and officially be 3D Vision-ready, so you should put it in your to look forward to list of games.

Some other games that might be officially 3D Vision-ready are the upcoming on February 16th Aliens vs Predator with its multiplayer demo just released and available for download over Steam (this one is supposed to be DirectX 11 and ATI Eyefinity title, so official 3D Vision-readiness is a bit questionable). There is also the expected to be released on March 2nd Battlefield: Bad Company 2, another first-person shooter that is currently undergoing a beta testing stage.

Finally if you already own a 3D Vision kit you might complete a short survey that Nvidia is currently conducting regarding the accessories that come with their shutter glasses. So if you have a spare minute you can fill in the few simple questions, absolutely anonymous, providing some feedback on how you use the product and this way maybe help improving the next version of the 3D Vision….

- To fill in the 3D Vision Accessories survey currently being conducted by Nvidia…