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Ubisoft Expects 3DTV In Everyone's Home In Three Years
by Kris Graft [PC, Console/PC]
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July 9, 2010
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Ubisoft has been an outspoken proponent of 3D gaming, having worked on a 3D video game interpretation of James Cameron's multi-dimensional blockbuster film Avatar.
The publisher's UK marketing head Murray Pannell said Ubisoft's support for 3D will continue as game console makers like Sony Computer Entertainment and Nintendo push the technology forward -- and he's counting on rapid adoption of 3D-compatible televisions.
"The truth is I think it is a technology that's coming," he told Eurogamer. "We can't ignore it. It'll start slowly this year. But like HDTV, I wouldn't rule out the fact that this will be installed in everyone's living room in three year's time, and for us to be in a position to have content that could really look absolutely amazing in 3D."
Sony has unveiled 3D stereoscopic PlayStation 3 games, including Killzone 3 and Wipeout HD, while Nintendo generated substantial buzz at the E3 conference in June with the unveiling of the handheld 3DS system, which creates a 3D effect without the use of glasses.
Sony is particularly invested in 3D technology. Now that its PS3 can support the effect, it is releasing 3D Bravia televisions, tying its console into some television promotions.
A June study from research firm Informa forecast that North America will easily take the largest share of the 3DTV market with 60 percent of the 2010 total by year end. That share will drop to an estimated 41 percent by the end of 2015, as Western Europe and regions in Asia adopt the televisions.
The firm estimated that the U.S. will have 8.7 million active 3DTV households by the end of 2015, with Japan having 2 million, the UK 1.6 million and Korea 1.5 million.
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I agree with you, especially since the main 3D technology right now requires the usage of 3D glasses. I don't have a problem with using 3D glasses on movie theaters, but when it comes to home entertainment, I have to say no to 3D glasses. I would rather see 3D technology that didn't require 3D glasses at home than see one that did require 3D glasses. Besides, after watching James Cameron's Avatar on a movie theater, I can see the potential of a movie (as well as a game) using 3D to give the illusion of jumping inside the world that you see in front of you instead of using 3D to give the illusion of things popping out.
the only way this will happen is if LCDs prove to have a very short lifespan...
I was one of the first to get a 1080p TV, and I DO like 3D, but even I'm not going to buy a new tv for it... I'll wait until my current one dies.
Internet: "but surely those people don't exist - quick, lets take a poll of who isn't online"
-silence-
Internet: "See!"
Anyone remember virtual boy? Speaking of Nintendo, I think they may actually have something with the 3DS though.
I never see this mentioned, but I'm not convinced that the PS3 has the hardware to push a game in 3D without major sacrifices in graphic detail. The Cell processor is powerful, but I don't think the system has enough video RAM. It can't even run most 2D games at 1080p.
This brings up an interesting point in image information content: Humans genuinely do take two sets of stereoscopic image data and combine them, to not only extract depth information, but to supplement, corroborate and intercalate resolution provided by the eyes individually. Look at a flat picture with one eye. Then look at it with the other. Then look at it with both. Despite the image having a constant resolution, most people can perceptively discern a higher fidelity when using both, because their brains are able to combine the separate image sampling (limited by the 'hardware' in a given eye) for optimal resolution and quality.
With that said, what does it mean for games? Well, that two half images should actually be as good as one full image (with appropriate sampling), and even better when incorporating the additional depth information. I.E. rendering two images at something like 905 X 509 will end up producing the equivalent of a 720p combined image, and assuming rendering and memory costs are directly proportional to resolution (of course they aren't, quite), Stereo imagery at the same perceptual resolution should always take the same amount of power to render.
I see what you are getting at, but 1080p is 2.25x's more pixels than 720p; even with some perceptual gains, there's no way 720p 3D is going to look as crisp/detailed as 1080p 2D. Your brain can't see data that just isn't there. It might work if you could somehow interlace the two images into one 1080 one, but I suspect that would kill the 3D effect...?
I found an article covering a lot of the technical issues:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-making-of-ps3-3d-article
The short of it: expect lower resolutions, lower detail levels, and lower framerates. Wipeout basically takes a 50% performance hit, going from 1080p 60fps in 2D to 720p 30fps in 3D. Any gamer above the age of 5 is going to prefer the native 1080p image and high framerate to the 3D gimmick.
I've seen three 3D films in the theater, and probably won't see another. It just doesn't add enough to the experience.
It just seems so gimmicky, and I'm a guy who loves new tech and gadgets. No Luddite here.
How exactly would you do a 3D home theater without glasses. You have to deliver the right/left information to the correct eye somehow. Some people talk about sci-fi concepts where the action takes place inside a holotank of some kind, but that seems boring. How would you depict epic scenes or sweeping vistas in such a thing? Feh...
Now IMAX looks good. For the home we just need 100" sets with 4K resolution to be affordable. :-)
Although I like it (I am stereoblind, unless I am using those stupid 3D glasses... So ironically the two times in my entire life I saw something 3D was watching a 3D movie when I was child in the 90s, when finding a 3D theather was novelty and the movie had no plot at all but animals jumping out of the screen, and Avatar...)
i think they're about 5-6 years from making this affordable and useful for home consumers. but by then what will be the next big thing, holographic displays?
As far as I know, Wipeout HD must be a slightly special case, as it didn't quite run in true 1080p: as I recall, Wipeout HD was supposed to be more or less the first game with dynamic resolution rendering, allowing it to run at 1080p when the resources were there, and render lower and interpolate when the necessary horsepower wasn't available, in order to maintain it's smooth framerate. I'd wager in that case to adapt it for 3D, the developers capped the resolution/FPS performance at it's lower limit, because 1 - adaptive resolution probably plays havoc with stereoscopic perception; 2 - 3D conversion costs were constrained (it was offered free after all); 3 - sampling complexity made it too tough a job given development resources.
In information content terms, 2 720p images are close to a 1080p image (less, as you point out; this can be chalked up to resolution independent rendering performance non-linearities like geometry transformations, and is the real cost of 3D rendering) - and I attribute the '50%' loss (30fps vs 60fps) to the capping of the engine's performance at the lower performance limit, locking at that level to avoid all those flickering and synchronisation issues, and again to whatever other non-resolution scaling issues there are.
So yeah, performance will take a hit, but in perceptual terms less than the "Performance will be havled!!" scare stories are selling - at least when devs bother. On the other end, low power demand games (lots of downloadable type games, puzzle games etc.), which ran 1080p 60fps with oodles of power to spare can be tasked to render two independent 1080p images for 2K cinema perceptual resolution. Again, with clever sampling this could even be applied to 2D imagery and give you ridiculous quality imagery.
Of course I personally think the glasses thing is retarded. 100 pounds a pop and I don't even get the IR emitter? Halved brightness? No thanks.
How will this impact the 3DTV market? How will this impact Sony, who appears to be betting on 3D just as they had bet on Blu-Ray? I can't fathom any great demand from consumers for this technology, especially in this economy (the 2nd great variable). Remember that many of us are still using old picture tube sets -- roughly 50% of households have HDTV sets. How would you feel if you were told that you had to throw away your new LCD television and buy the shiny, new 3-D television?
Consumer electronics has worked on this scam for ages. Buy a gadget, build up a library, then throw it all out for the "super" gadget, and re-purchase your entire library again...at a higher price this time. I know I'm tired of it. Having switched from VHS to DVD, I'm far less willing to throw everything out for Blu-Ray. Who's to say there won't be a "super" Blu-Ray coming down the pike?
For some reason, I'm having flashbacks to the Atari 7800. Why am I being asked to shell out money for Ms. Pac-Man yet again? This is the dilemma facing this industry, and until these basic questions are addressed, any talk of "3DTV in every home" is a deluded cartoon fantasy.
LOL awsome!!
3DTV In Everyone's Home In Three Years.
I can only say dream on.
3DTV is an industry driven technology. Consumers are not asking for this upgrade. Nobody wants glasses or decreased picture quality. Very few people have enough disposable income to buy a new TV much less an expensive 3DTV and the needed glasses (for the entire family too).
3D is for the theaters. That is where it should stay until no accessories are needed to have 3D in the home. Maybe once DoubleHD is released and a new 3D technology is created without accessories being needed then the electronics industry can cram this down our throats and we might care to choke it down.
That's definitely interesting; I wonder if the likes of Sony are weighing up the cost benefit of finding a new way to sell us televisions while undercutting their cinema business or vice versa. Maybe this will vary by studio depending on their ties to consumer electronics - i.e. Sony may be the lone studio on this. Worryingly, I see a similar problem facing televisions and videogames - How much better can the reproduction get? Graphics have rapidly approached photo-realism and when they reach it where is there left to go? (well, 3D and more immersive interface for the time being). Television quality is improving to the point of complete visual immersion, and so what is there left to improve upon after 3D? Wrap around?
The business challenge to Cinema is made more poignent by the loss of sizing perspective with the 3D medium. Some of the draw of a cinema is the huge size of the screen, but when your perceptions of proportion are artificially driven by the stereoscopic display, a 3D image on a home screen can appear just as large as a cinema, so long as it encompasses the same angular field of view.
This makes me wonder, primarily for CG films, whether Hollywood will be interested in re-rendering their films with adjusted perspectives to better suit the home theatre display compared to the big screen - probably not if it costs and it hurts their interests.
It also makes me wonder - if size is no longer an issue in 3D, then can't handhelds start displacing TVs? Maybe not the 3DS, but a face tracking perspective corrected 3D iphone6 Retina display could be more or less indistinguishable from a cinema. At $200 a pop, that's probably easier and cheaper overall than outfitting your whole family with the glasses. Nintendo's downloadable movie business could end up being more a important indicator of the future than the whole of Xbox Live.