Meant to be Seen just announced the availability of a dedicated TeamSpeak server, designed to host all sorts of stereo 3D discussions. With up to 512 slots available, this server is a great central hub for stereoscopic 3D gamers to help each other out and talk to each other while playing their favorite games online and in S3D of course. The idea seems great, now just lets see if people will really find it useful… ;)
In order to make this work, you will need a webcam and/or a headset with microphone. Just download the free TeamSpeak client and choose www.mtbs3d.com as your TeamSpeak address. Then pick your channel and start chatting and I’m already heading there to try it out.
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.
Neil Schneider from MTBS3D.com did another great interview at CES 2010 with Don Mesa, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Sony Computer Entertainment America about Sony’s plans for stereoscopic 3D (S-3D) gaming related to the PS3 of course. As it become clear in the previous interview Neil did with Steve Venuti, the President of HDMI Licensing the firmware upgrade for PlayStation 3 will update the HDMI to 1.4, or at least most of the specifications of the new version that do not require additional hardware to work with. And of course the new Sony Bravia 3D HDTVs will be using full blown HDMI 1.4 hardware, so the stereoscopic 3D support will be based on the new version of the specifications as expected. But you should watch the whole video for all the details and some other interesting things regarding stereoscopic 3D and Sony…
