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.
HDMI Licensing has announced the release of HDMI Specification Version 1.4a featuring some enhancements for 3D applications including the addition of mandatory 3D formats for broadcast content as well as the addition of the 3D format referred to as Top-and-Bottom. An extraction of the 3D portion of Specification Version 1.4a is also freely available for public download on the HDMI Web site in order to provide public access to the 3D portion of the HDMI Specification for those companies and organizations that are not HDMI Adopters, but require access to this portion of the Specification.
Having set a complete set of Mandatory 3D Formats in HDMI Specification Version 1.4 (with the updates available in 1.4a), the association is trying to ensure interoperability for devices designed to deliver 3D content over the HDMI connection. Implementing the mandatory formats of the HDMI Specification facilitates interoperability among devices, allowing devices to speak a common 3D language when transmitting and receiving 3D content. Or in plain words that means that you’ll be able to plug in your PlayStation 3 console, when it is updated to support stereo 3D, into a 3D-ready Samsung HDTV for example and not only having to use it with a compatible Sony TV set. Here is a list of the mandatory 3D formats that should all be supported by all compatible displays to ensure full compatibility…
For movie content (like Blu-ray 3D)
- Frame Packing: 1080p @23.98/24Hz
For game content (like PS3)
- Frame Packing: 720p @50 or 59.94/60Hz
For broadcast content (like 3D TV)
- Side-by-Side Horizontal: 1080i @50 or 59.94/60Hz
- Top-and-Bottom: 720p @ 50 or 59.94/60Hz or 1080p @23.97/24Hz
For more information you can go and download the updated 3D portion of the HDMI Specification Version 1.4a form the official HDMI website as it is freely available to anyone interested, you just need to fill in a form with some information.
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…
