According to the U-DECIDE Initiative, a well received study of modern gamers, 93% of survey respondents want to see game developers support stereoscopic 3D technology. The industry answered by starting development of The S-3D Gaming Alliance (S3DGA), a non-profit corporation that is 100% focused on making stereoscopic 3D gaming possible through standards, education, and product adoption.
“We need an industry-wide standard for S-3D gaming, and S3DGA has the drive and experience to push this forward. All developers and manufacturers should participate,” said Habib Zargarpour, Senior Art Director for Electronic Arts Inc.
“S-3D gaming content is available on PC and console, gamers are great viral marketers, and our industry needs to reach out to the early adopters first. Our industry needed a qualified voice, so S3DGA was formed to properly leverage and develop this market,” said Neil Schneider, S3DGA’s Executive Director and Spokesperson.
S3DGA’s current members include LG Electronics, Blitz Games Studios, RealD, Next3D, DDD, Jon Peddie Research, Sensio, TDVision Corp, iZ3D, and more.
Advisory board members include Habib Zargarpour, Senior Art Director for Electronic Arts, Andrew Oliver, CTO and Co-Founder of Blitz Games Studios, and Neil Trevett, President of the Khronos Group & VP of NVIDIA Mobile Content.
S3DGA wanted its first board to be comprised of people without vested interests until there is a member driven nomination or election process. The initial Board of Directors includes:
- Syd Bolton, Interim S3DGA President, is also the Curator of the Personal Computer Museum in Brantford, Ontario. A seasoned expert in gaming and gaming history, Mr. Bolton has been featured on The Space Channel, MuchMusic, Custom PC, Games Magazine, and more.
- Mark Fihn, S3DGA Vice-President, is the publisher of Veritus et Visus. A top analyst and consultant, his company publishes a well respected 3D newsletter that features columns written by top industry executives and pioneers.
- John Merritt, S3DGA Treasurer, is the founder of the Stereoscopic Displays & Applications Conference, the oldest stereoscopic 3D conference in the world. Mr. Merritt is a leading consultant on matters of S-3D quality and immersive experience.
“I really believe that 2010 is the year that 3D will hit at home with consumers more than ever, and having this alliance is more critical than ever to ensure everyone is on the same page,” said Syd Bolton, S3DGA’s President.
The interim Standards Division Chair is Keith Elliott.
“When we are talking about standards in gaming, it’s not just about passing a left and right image to the display — that’s easy. Game developers also need to speak the same language, quality and compliance expectations need to be set, and lots of compatibility politics are going to surface very quickly I’m sure. We wanted a strong people person to head this up, and this individual’s previous work had to be well known. We found that person in Keith Elliott,” Schneider explained.
Keith Elliott is one of the key inventors of the low-cost stereoscopic display architecture used in over two million 3D DLP high-definition (HD) televisions. This high-speed “checkerboard” layout grew popular by offering high-quality 3D HD video at the lowest cost possible. In gaming, it is already supported by DDD, iZ3D, NVIDIA, and multiple game engines. As Director of New Business Technology for the HDTV group at Texas Instruments (TI), Keith was involved in the development of the infrastructure needed to support a wide roll-out of 3D content to the home consumer. He also directed TI’s systems engineering team that delivered DLP technology to HDTV manufacturers around the world. He is currently a founder and technology consultant for Screen’s Edge, LLC.
TriDef 3D Media Player is the multimedia photo and video player that you get with Acer Aspre 3D laptops and some other 3D displays, but you can as well buy the TriDef 3D experience software separately. Besides the movie and photo player you also get the TriDef 3D Ignition software that is intended to be used to play games in Stereoscopic 3D mode, but I’ll talk about the gaming part with TriDef software in another post and now lets get back to the Media Player…
The TriDef 3D Media Player is intended to be used to play back stereoscopic 3D movies and pictures, along with normal 2D images and 2D movies that can be converted in real time to 3D. The player practically supports all popular movie and photo containers and formats, including support for the proprietary formats used by the developers of the player DDD – .TriDefMovie, .TriDefPhoto and .TriDefPOPvert. The good thing is that you just need to have the proper DirectShow splitter filter and codec in order to be able to play the video in the player and possibly convert it from 2D to 3D in real time. However prior to the just released today TriDef 3D Media Player version 6.5.5 I had some issues with playing back some video files in MOV, TS and MP4 file containers although the system had the needed support installed, but the good news is that the new version has this fixed. I was a bit disappointed by the fact that the player does not support side by side stereoscopic 3D video and I also had some trouble with above/below, although these should be working and with field sequential video too.
What is quite interesting in this player is the feature to convert in real time 2D videos into stereoscopic 3D, even DVD Video and HD clips. However you should know that the resulting 3D effect depends on a lot of factors and sometimes it can be better and sometimes it can be worse, but there are some things that you should be aware in order to get better results. Using higher resolution and better quality videos does help a lot to provide better conversion results, also using videos with steadier and not too fast paced action usually results in better depth perception. A usual problem for 2D to 3D conversions are the fast paced trailers that do have a lot of action and switch between too much different scenes very quickly, so you might want to avoid these, but it won’t hurt to try them just in case. 3D CG animation movies are usually Ok when converted in stereoscopic 3D, but working with 2D drawn or cell shaded Anime the effect of depth is not that good, but there are still exceptions.
And since there are not a lot of stereoscopic 3D movies and even trailers available having an Ok feature that allows you to convert 2D to 3D videos, however being far from true stereoscopic 3D shot or rendered content is still nice to have. You can also do something else with the help of additional software like Fraps for instance (the video recording framerate should be set to match the source framerate and don’t forget to record audio!) – I mean that you can capture the real time video conversion into an Interlaced video format and then share it with other people that do not have TriDef compatible hardware/software to do this themselves, but still have some sort of Stereoscopic 3D setup. After grabbing the converted video stream with Fraps you should reconvert it to something smaller in size, but have in mind that you should maintain high quality of the video compression in order not to get something with bad quality 3D. An example of what you can achieve with the automatic 2D to 3D conversion with the media player is available here Avatar HD Movie Trailer in Stereoscopic 3D Format. Some videos can convert better, other can convert worse… the results depend on a lot of factors, but I’ll say again that this is still not as good as a true stereoscopic 3D content, so don’t get your hopes too high.
The player does not offer a lot of options and the conversion to 3D is almost completely automatic, however you still have control on two things that can roughly be considered to be equivalent of depth and convergence level (the two controls in the right). This allows you to tweak a bit the results in order to minimize the ghosting in the final video or to improve a bit the stereoscopic 3D effect, but still the rest is done by predefined algorithms. And no matter how good are these algorithms for conversion they are still not perfect and can do mistakes like adding depth where they are not supposed to for instance, although considering they do not require any serious setting up they still manage to do their job quite well and don’t forget that everything is being done in real time.
Last week Neil Schneider from MTBS started telling the story of the stereoscopic 3D history in the form of a YouTube stereoscopic 3D video and this week the second part of that video was made available. This time Neil is talking about more recent events regarding the S3D development with the story ending in 2008, so next week we’ll probably get the third part with more, and it will most likely be focused more on Nvidia’s 3D Vision as this is the big thing for 2009.
