3D Vision Blog

The 3D Entertainment Summit is an event that is focused on how the 3D entertainment transformation is affecting the business of entertainment, it is the event of choice for the key players in 3D entertainment across theatrical, broadcast, television, gaming, advertising and alternate content. In it’s fourth year, the 3D Entertainment Summit is going to bring thought leaders from around the globe to analyze where 3D has been and more importantly where it is headed. An unfiltered “state-of-the-industry” that affords an in-depth look at how visionaries and luminaries see the future ahead in this rapidly changing marketplace.

This will be the second year for The 3D Gaming Summit, an event focused entirely on 3D gaming, and it will for the first time be held in conjunction with The 4th Annual 3D Entertainment Summit in Hollywood. The 3D Entertainment Summit will run on September 20-22, with a dedicated day to the 3D Gaming Summit (featuring 3D Gaming & Beyond) on September 22nd. The whole event is scheduled to take place on September 20-22, 2011 at the Hollywood & Highland Center, Hollywood, California, USA.

- For more information about the 3D Entertainment Summit & 3D Gaming Summit 2011…

Nintendo has released some financial results that contain some interesting information regarding the sales of their 3D-capable 3DS portable console. For example during the last three months that ended in June 2011 the worldwide sales of the Nintendo 3DS console accounted for 0.71 million units and for the same timeframe Nintendo has sold more than double non-3D portable consoles in the form of Nintendo DS (1.44 million units). The worldwide sales of the bigger Nintendo Wii console were even more with 1.56 million units sold for that quarter, so the 3DS needs to catch up a lot, especially considering the fact that the older products are already available on the market for quite some time.

On the software side, Nintendo has sold 4.53 million games for the 3DS console, as opposed to 12.13 million for the DS and 13.44 million for the Wii console. Of course here the older consoles have the advantage of much larger user base, but it is also up to the number of hit titles available for each console. For example thanks to the game “The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D” considered a top game title the number of software sales for the 3DS were just at about 1/3 of the games sold for one of the other platforms which is actually quite good. And in truth Nintendo is blaming the slow hardware sales due to the lack of hit titles for the Nintendo 3DS, which is probably true considering the fact that the interest in 3D is booming and that the 3DS still has no serious competition.

- You can find more details about Nintendo’s financial results in this PDF…

3D Vision Surround is a nice additional feature that you can take advantage of for more immersive stereoscopic 3D gaming if you have an SLI setup or a Dual-GPU video card and three 3D-capable displays – 3D monitors or 3D projectors. In the case of three Full HD 3D monitors you get a wider horizontal working area with a total resolution of 5760×1080, covering your peripheral vision better in games and giving you more working area. It sounds really promising and my impressions from the few demonstrations of the technology, where I’ve seen and tried it with a few games were quite positive, but of course sooner or later I had to make a 3D Vision Surround setup to dou some more extensive testing…

It has turned out quite hard to get three 3D monitors of the same model just for testing, so I invited a friend to bring his own 24-inch Acer GD245HQ and together with the other two monitors I’ve managed to get we started testing multiple games yesterday and it was a long day. Originally I planned to do the testing in 3D Vision Surround mode with the GeForce GTX 590 video card, but do to some hardware trouble with the test system used for the 590, I had to change the idea on the go and move to my test PC with dual GeForce GTX 580s in SLI. I’ve had a big table planned for the three monitor setup, and we barely managed to fit the monitors on it… 3D Vision Surround setups even with 24-inch monitors do need a lot of space for comfortable use, and if you plan to do it with the new 27-inch monitors, you should really have a lot of free space. Other than that the setup and installation was quick, easy and problem free in general, so we moved to the testing phase and sometime early in the morning today we’ve finished with going through about 30 games in 3D Vision Surround. During the testing there were some interesting, unexpected and surprising results, so you should be prepared that not every single game will work problem free, some require a bit of tweaking and a few just don’t work. In general however the experience when everything works out is great and you quickly start to not pay too much attention to the bezels of the screens and get fully immersed in the gaming.

You can expect more photos and the results later on, as now I need some more coffee, to disassemble the test setup and pack the monitors up for returning them. I can say I’m quite happy with the results, although the whole thing was not entirely problem free. But I’m still having a hard time judging which one I like better, a single 50-inch 3D HDTV or a 3D Vision Surround setup with three 24-inch 3D monitors, because both have their advantages and their disadvantages. In the end, I’m going back to my single 3D Full HD monitor for my gaming needs in stereo 3D mode with 3D Vision as a preferred choice for now…