3D Vision Blog

Today Sony will be releasing MotorStorm 3D Rift to PSN with a price of $9.99 USD. This is the next stereoscopic 3D game available for the PlayStation 3 gamers that already have a 3D HDTV and are playing still just few of the stereo 3D-capable titles. The game MotorStorm 3D Rift includes 10 tracks from MotorStorm Pacific Rift like Kanaloa Bay or Caldera Ridge, and provides a selection of festival-favorite off-road vehicles including Bikes, Buggies, Racing Trucks, and Monster Trucks. In 3D Rift you’ll have 10 unique events to compete in (one for each track) with the full range of competitor difficulty levels through the races, so you can enjoy the brutal off-road racing at your leisure or take on the toughest and most competitive rivals.

And of course Sony plans to further expand the MotorStorm experience in 3D, but that will happen next year with the release of MotorStorm Apocalypse that is going to be complete game with stereoscopic 3D support unlike the kind of limited implementation that will be available in MotorStorm 3D Rift which is more like a 3D-capable demo of the game MotorStorm Pacific Rift. Anyway, if you already have the PS3 updated to the latest firmware with support for stereoscopic 3D gaming along with a 3D-capable HDTV, then you should go and get MotorStorm 3D Rift.

- For more details about the upcoming S3D-ready MotorStorm Apocalypse game for PS3…

At the moment a lot of people are concerned about the possible negative effects that watching stereo 3D content might possibly bring, and there are even speculations that it could even lead to permanent damage to the viewer’s eyes if watching too much 3D content on a daily basis. It is true that there haven’t been too much tests regarding this being done, but there are also no cases that confirm that watching stereo 3D content can lead to some health risks. Actually the only real concern is for small kids while their eyes and brain are still being developed, so maybe just in case you should be careful there is you have children. Other than that you can experience some short-term lets call them side effects from watching stereo 3D content like a movie, TV show, playing a game etc. and at least half of the time the reason for you getting uncomfortable, your eyes feeling tired, getting disoriented etc. is due to being exposed to badly shot or converted 3D content.

But beyond those short-term effects is there risk of permanent eye damage from exposing eyeballs to the faux third dimension for prolonged periods of time? That is what Gamasutra has asked a specialist – Dr. Mark Borchert, a respected L.A.-based ophthalmologist with the American Academy of Ophthalmology and here is what he answered:

It’s not likely to cause any permanent harm to vision. There are people who get uncomfortable with it, and get eye strain or headaches, or on much rarer occasions, a sense of imbalance or nausea, but there’s no evidence it can cause permanent harm to your vision or use of both eyes together or anything like that.

However while Borchert admitted that ophthalmologists “don’t have an answer” to the negative effects of 3D effect viewing on young children, the expert pegged the appropriate 3D viewing age even lower than Nintendo.

Binocularity and stereoscopic vision is something that is learned in the first few years of life, primarily in about the first three years of life. So it’s unlikely that children at that age, where stereoscopic vision is developing most critically, are going to be playing these games. But the effect of 3D on young children, we have no idea. For older children, it’s not going to hurt them. I can’t imagine how this is going to cause any kind of permanent harm to someone who is over four years of age.

Here I can personally confirm that being exposed to “fake” 3D content on computer screens, HMDs, paper prints and other sources for years I have no problems with my normal stereoscopic vision whatsoever, but then again I’m also well over three years old. And regarding the uncomfortable and more tiring first experience that most people have when then watch some 3D content for the first time, there is another scientific explanation, but simply said the main reason is that it is simply something new and our eyes and brain need some time to adjust to it. So you should not get discouraged about watching stereo 3D movies or playing games in stereo 3D mode just because you first experience was a bit uncomfortable, try again a few times and if you still don’t get used to it, then you might have some trouble with your eyes or something else, so you should go and see a specialist just in case.

And now what is the actual and a it more technical reason for the first maybe not so comfortable experience of some 3D content when you are exposed for more than a few minutes. The way that out eyes normally work is that they perceive the depth we are seeing by converging at an object we want to focus on based on the distance to it – for close objects they converge more and for more distant objects they may even remain parallel. And this movement of the eyes is achieved by the extraocular muscles of which each eye has six that are responsible for it’s movement and depending on the distance to the object you are focusing on the eyes need to move in order to converge with the right angle. Then you also have the eyes focus differently depending on the distance to the object you converged your vision on and that is done by changing the curvature of the lens inside your eyes with the help of the ciliary muscles. These two things happen together in order for use to perceive the depth of real world objects when we are not watching stereo 3D content on out computer or TV screen…

However when watching 3D content on a screen there is something different and new to out eyes and brain and that is exactly what tires you at first, because you need some time to adjust to the new “sensation” and learn how to properly do it. You can even say that your eye muscles need to be trained too, although it is not only up to the muscles not being ready for the additional load they need to handle when watching stereo 3D content. As already mentioned while we are babies and small kids our binocularity and stereoscopic vision is being developed and we learn how to see and perceive the distance and depth of everything in the world around us. And since we use the method described above in the real world and try to apply the same when watching stereo 3D content on a flat screen, we try to do things the same way at first, but in case of “fake” 3D content displayed on screen there is something different. Normally when you are watching an object at a distance of 10 meters away form you your eyes are first converging for that distance of ten meters and then they focus for the same distance of 10 meters. However when watching a stereo 3D movie or playing a game in stereo 3D mode our eyes are still having to converge for a different distance depending on what content is being currently displayed on the monitor (lets say the 3D screen is 1 meter away from the viewer), so if you get an object that appears deeper inside the screen your eyes will let’s say converge for a distance of 3 meters or if something jumps out of the screen they will converge for lets say half a meter. So this way the first part is the same our eyes still converge differently depending on the sense of volume (depth or pop-out) we have of the objects displayed on the 3D screen although the screen is actually sitting at a fixed position, but by changing the separation between the frames seen by out left and right eyes. However regarding the distance that out eyes need to focus depending on the object being displayed on a 3D screen things are a bit different compared to the real world, as if you converge on an object that is 3 meters away from you in the real world your eyes will also focus for a 3 meter distance. But when you are watching the same thing on a 3D display your eyes will still converge for a 3 meter distance, but the focus you will get will not be for 3 meters like in the real world, but will instead remain at 1 meter – the distance to where your 3D monitor is. Now this is the exact reason that at first the stereo 3D content feels a bit weird, unreal and tiring for our eyes and brain, but after watching a second or third movie or trying to play a game for a few times in stereo 3D mode we adjust and we can easily do this different way of seeing things without feeling strain.

And now comes the role of bad 3D content like movies that were converted from 2D to 3D and that conversion hasn’t been properly made. Going to such a movie can have all the bad effects you’ve felt the first time when you watched some stereoscopic 3D content and in result can create a bad image for the movie (which is to be expected), but also can draw away people from stereo 3D in general usually because of them not knowing the difference between good and bad 3D and/or not knowing that they have actually watched a movie shot in 2D and then badly converted in 3D. The problem with bad conversions to 3D is that generally they contain contradicting depth cues or objects that our brain tells us that should be closer to us, but our eyes tell us just the opposite – that they should be very far form us. This again leads to some additional strain for both the brain and the eyes that are contradicting each other, but there can also be a lot of other factors that can lead to bad experience like jumping trough fast scenes all the time with very far and very close objects with our eyes having to readjust to these changes too quick and too much and so on. And then again there should be no health risks associated with watching even badly converted 2D to 3D content, it just leaves a long term bad experience and may as well drive that person away from 3D for a while. However bringing small kids younger than 3 years to watch a badly converted 2D to 3D movie, or exposing them to an autoconverted 2D to 3D TV show or a movie at home on the new 3D HDTV is definitely not a good idea!

Last week I was able to see a live demonstration of the Nvidia 3DTV Play in action. The software was running on Sony 3D and Panasonic 3D HDTVs and demonstrated on them was playing games in stereoscopic 3D mode as well as Blu-ray 3D movie playback using PowerDVD 10 Ultra Mark II. And after seeing it in action for the first time I was able to clarify some things for myself and it yet again has sparkled my interest into 3D-capable HDTVs, because with the general lack of other 3D content the part about PC gaming in stereo 3D mode on a big-screen 3D TV is what would actually justify the purchase of a high-end television set with 3D capabilities…

The 3DTV Play software seems to act like a kind of wrapper providing 720p 50/60Hz and 1080p 24Hz per eye resolutions for 3D playback and using the 3D Vision driver that is now a part of the video drivers for GeForce video cards. Trying Just Cause 2 running at Full HD 1080p resolution and with 24 frames per second in 3D actually felt surprisingly good, fluid just like playing most games on a console, and although not like the way PC users are used to play with higher framerates it is still Ok. Of course playing in 720p resolution with higher framerates might be better and actually the difference in perceptible quality between playing in 1080p and 720p taking the framerate aside is not so easily noticeable. The software seemed to work quite easy and problem free, although it most likely wasn’t the final version that should be soon released.

The Nvidia 3DTV Play software is expected to be available sometime later this month, so the wait is almost over for the people that were early in actually buying a HDMI 1.4(a) 3D-capable HDTV and want to easily use it for gaming in stereo 3D. And since the Panasonic Viera 3D HDTVs are currently on top of my personal list on deciding which 3D TV I should probably buy for 3D testing and personal entertainment, I was more interested in how it performed in stereo 3D mode and in this case it was the 50-inch VT20E available in Europe.

Something that caught my attention was the dithering on the Panasonic, and since it is a plasma TV these flashing colorful dots on black are to be expected to some extent. Of course they are visible only when watching the TV screen from very close distance and when you get to the optimum viewing distance you cannot actually perceive them as they blend nicely creating the full image. The above image shows the dithering in normal 2D mode…

Here is another picture with the same image displayed on the screen, taken when the TV is in 3D mode, but not trough the glasses. The dithering is a bit more visible from closer distance, but again when getting back a bit from the TV things are again Ok. As I already said the dithering is normal for Plasma TVs, however it is less visible on some and more apparent on other TVs, so it is actually not an issue, I just expected it to be a bit less apparent as it is with the Samsung 3D Plasma TVs for example.

Anyway, another thing that differs the Panasonic 3D TVs is the fact that they do not feature a 2D to 3D conversion algorithm built-in, which is not exactly a bad thing and I personally can go just fine without such a feature. However I’m still not to happy with the design of the glasses, sure they do look quite nice and with a futuristic design, but the functionality part is a bit neglected… in terms of best 3D shutter glasses on my personal list Sony is still at the top spot. But anyway, I will not be making a purchase of a 3D HDTV before the 3DTV Play software comes out officially and I’m able to play a bit more with it on different TVs as for me the purchase of such 3D-capable HDTV at the moment will be mostly targeted at gaming… even if it is in 720p 50/60Hz, although quite a few games should be just fine when played back even in 1080p 24Hz too.