Be Excellent To Each Other

So, all the major TV companies unveiled 3D models at the CES over the weekend, and at the same time Sony announce that the next Gran Turismo will have official 3DTV support.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8447432.stm

Are people going to make their next TV a 3D one or are people too skeptical after only just upgrading to HD?

Anyone thinking of buying the first generation of this kind of thing either has more money than sense, or doesn't mind the idea of being stuck with something that is rendered obsolete very quickly.

No, this is not a big deal, not for quite a long time.

We're hopefully too sceptical. Format evolution has gone crazy.

Can you get 3D porn yet?

Yeah, problem is you have to keep buying them flowers, talk to them, and occasionally cuddle.

People across the world today expressed shock at a new TV standard to get us all to buy our tellies again. Already pissed off at widescreen, digital, flatscreen and HD, it proved too much to bear for the weary population. Desperate begging robdogs at major electronics firms remained glum. "We thought they'd be well up for it after the success we had at flogging them VHSs DVDs and BluRays. Everyone likes to buy the same thing they've already got countless times over with just a miniscule difference between them! I mean, come on!" said A.N. Thwait.

I've yet to come across someone who likes the idea of needing to wear glasses to watch tv.

Have you met anyone who likes the idea of needing to wear glasses to watch TV, though?

Well. No.

To put it another way, given quite how popular contact lenses are, you'd think that this isn't exactly onto a winner. And this is despite how little people in general like things to touch their eyes.

It'd still be the same old shit on the TV anyway. Either that, or it'd be like that week when Going Live did 3D and Trevor and Simon lunged things at the screen every half a second. ALL THE TIME.

For gaming too, expect a big hit to framerate and/or resolution for 3D gaming.

It's bullshit.

I look a bit like a hairy potato when I wear contact lenses, they make my eyes itch too. Both contact lenses & 3D telly can GTFF.

For the sake of bucking the curmudgeonly old twat trend I'd like to say that after watching Avatar in 3D that I think that playing a racing game like that would be ace. I reckon I could deal with having to wear glasses for it because I'm hard as nails like that. Wouldn't buy a new telly for the privilege though.

Hmm, I doubt you actually "need" to buy a new telly for this. A PC and monitor, with the goggles plugged in or wirelessly connected, aught to do it, right?

I'll defer judgment on the goggles until I've tried them at the cinema. I don't see it being a barrier though, given how 4maZ1ng!!! 3D will look on your own telly.

But yes, no doubt they'll try to force all sorts of propreitary buy-in to force a new round of tellies on everyone. I'm still on CRT, thanks.

Of course you'll have to buy a new telly! It's a GREAT excuse to get more money.

I'm not saying it wouldn't be ace. I'm saying that I don't really see that it'll be overly popular.

Its the manufacturers driving all of this. They need to sell more TV's so 3D is the next thing.

From my point of view, nobody has ever asked me if I'll shoot their project in HD. I choose to do so because it brings benefits to how the finished production looks, especially online. Interlaced video is the devils work and is a pig to deal with if you need to convert it to computer based formats. It's hard to deinterlace well. The driver for me in shooting HD is I can shoot 720p which converts to 576p beautifully but also looks great on PC's.

The client probably never realises although some get excited when you tell them you'll give them an HD Windows Media file on a DVD.

Yeah, I am not saying "Having one image for one eye, and another for another" is never going to be good and/or popular, but there is no way it going to go from being the next big thing to the current big thing as fast as some of the TV manufacturers seem to wish, and here is why:

1. There is no consensus on what the best way to do it is. There is like 6/7 technologies which all have different strengths and weaknesses. Active glasses, passive glasses, ones requiring no glasses. All have their problems, and no one technique is going to be compatible with others.

2. Content: What exactly are people going to watch? The odd film which is filmed for 3D? The Final Destination, Avatar, and some CGI films (which are relatively easy to make "3D"). It's going to be a pretty tough sell when anything that is live action has to be filmed specifically for it (unlike HD where basically anything can be remastered at HD resolutions). Games present another issue entirely: Pushing essentially twice as many pixels is going to tax system resources. Where is that performance going to come from? Are you going to cut back on resolution, framerate or graphical fidelity relative to playing the same game in 2D, or are developers going to optimise their games for the 0.005% of players who have a 3D TV (They are not). PC's might work a bit better, but then you still need the developers to play nice, and they have only done so at this point when nvidia have been nice enough to chuck money at them.

3. Headaches. Lots of these technologies give a lot of people headaches after any extended use.

4. They really mishandled "HD". When TV manufacturers started making telly's that do higher resolutions than PAL/NTSC, all they cared about was selling them. They took basically no steps to ensure that people actually understood what they were buying and how it worked, or that they would be forward compatible. The vast majority of people don't really understand what HD actually means. Hell, I know lots of people who bought a nice big HD telly, and plugged their old DVD player in with a scart cable and said "Doesn't it look better now it is in HD". Yes it did look better than their old telly, but obviously that was nothing to do with the resolution. I don't think people who invested in HD DVDs are going to be first in line for anything to do with 3D TV.

It think any real excitement for this kind of thing comes from people who haven't really got any understanding of it, tech journalists, and people who hold some sort of stake in the sales of new tvs.

i prefer 2d

It'll be the same number of pixels - it's just a different way of drawing them on the screen. The are a (very) few PC games that support 3D.

How so? If you are rendering two images (one for each eye), then it's twice the amount of visual information right? Assuming resolution and framerate remain constant.


Yeah, I played Arkham Asylum and Need For Speed: Shift. Both were nice, but it was hardly game changing.

Put it this way: I would have prefered a bigger screen or nicer graphics instead of 3D in both of those instances.

How did those work though, red/blue filters? I have tried using those before and agree they're basically not worth the effort. The lcd "shutter" glasses are a different story supposedly.

This is how I was aware it worked. Rendering two render targets would theoretically mean twice the resolution. However, it's quite possible that there are ways to share the load, assuming sufficent memory is available for multiple buffers.

They halve the frame rate, however. 30 fps games would be horrendous, outputting at an effective 15fps.

LCD shutter glasses.

Everything was a little bit dimmer than it should have been. The HUD was right up close (for anyone that has seen Avatar 3D, like how the HUD on the camera logs looked like), and you got a decent bit of simulated depth perception.

The set up was Nvidia 3D Vision, it requires:

1. 3D vision glasses - Bout £130
2. Compatible Graphics card (high end Nvidia ones)
3. 120hz monitor
4. Compatible game (which are are listed here)

How they work is that the PC generates 2 images, one for what it wants you to see from the left eye, one for what it wants you to see from the right eye. It then shows those two images alternately (so every second is 60 frames of each image). Then it syncs up with the glasses, which essentially block your eyes from each frame, alternately.

Essentially, it is the same idea as polarized light in 3D cinemas, but since they can't make moniors spit out polarized light, they have to physically block the "wrong" image from entering the "wrong" eye.

The reason everything looked a bit dimmer than usual is because each eye is only getting half the amount of light that they normally do.

I also can't help but feel that in something interactive like a game, the inability to get more 3d information by moving your head would feel really wrong, and lead to a disconnect.

We know how 2d behaves. We know how 3d behaves. Something like this behaves like neither.♠

That's why I am still baffled no one has gone in for head tracking + simulated perspective yet. It would work with all tellys, not be that expensive, and be pretty fucking baddass.

Utterly baffled.

They'll sell a few to the hopeless over-nerds who have far too much money and buy anything new. Everyone else will get bored of the fad and laugh derisively at the idea of forking out for a silly tv that looks like crap if you don't have special glasses, and just get on with their lives.

They have, haven't they? We discussed it recently, and some of us (myself included) didn't really get how it could work unless your TV scooted around your wall as you moved.

There's a fairly convincing video showing proof of concept.

Basically this kind of thing:



It is cheap as hell to make (he is basically just using a normal telly, a pair of passive glasses with two infra red leds on them, an the infra red camera from a Wii Remote)

Limitations:
Can only possibly work for one person
Can only work for realtime rendered images (ie games, not live action recorded stuff)

benefits:
Works with all current displays
Isn't particularly taxing on system resources

I probably will, but given how much I spent on the last one, I'm banned from buying another tv for a good ten years or so.

I can't wait for 3D coverage of the snooker championship. I always thought the game could be improved with the addition of Trevor and Simon lunging at the camera with balloons and jelly and stuff. Maybe picture in picture.

Maybe. The existing PC ones use a set of glasses that flicker at 60Hz in each eye, so then alternate frames on the display go to the left and right eyes. This means framerates fall to 30Hz, which isn't great. The TVs at CES use polarised light instead, same as the current generation of 3d cinema displays, so you can get 60Hz to each eye. This causes less headaches and means the glasses don't need a power source.

Contact lenses, amongst people I've spoken to, are more about practical benefits like not steaming up, not getting rain on them, and not getting knocked off your face. None of that really applies when sat in your living room watching TV.

Well, yeah, but we're already at 1080p for some games on this generation of gaming hardware -- so unless we see a further increase in base resolution in the next gen (highly unlikely as 1080p is exceeding the visual acuity of the human eye at common screen size and viewing distance) it's not unreasonable to imagine there'll be enough grunt in the consoles to support this.

There are a few no-glasses-required systems too, all using varients of the lenticular display used in the new Range Rover.

Hmmm. That's kinda suggesting that, say, a 40" 1080p LCD isn't actually a total night-and-day upgrade over your CRT, and is instead a cynical moneymaking ploy. Personally I think HD is awesome.

More than you might think, as Lewie has pointed out. And as he's noted above, it halves framerate.

As with HD, I suspect much of the broadcast content in the early days (and certainly much of what will show it off to great effect) will be nature documentaries.

I can't imagine much enjoyment coming from watching frogs jumping around and antelopes being pulled down by lions while Trevor and Simon lunge at the screen with balloons and jelly and stuff.

Soon, you won't need to imagine.

Also, let's hope they'll be available for the Queen's Funeral in 3D.

It's not so much about if there is enough grunt in the hardware (Invincible Tiger: The Legend of Han Tao on both 360 and PS3 can do stereoscopic 1080p at 60hz) it's more that if a game is going to be designed to take advantage of that, then it is not going to be using the hardware to it's full capability when ran only in 2D (like how playing 360 games at SD resolutions means that lots of unused detail is being rendered).

But existing TV is only 25 frames per second, innit?

Heh, quite possibly. I just mean, if you've already got a 120hz, 1080p 40" screen, you'd probably get pretty nice 3D on it without buying a new telly.

Fair play with the range-rover screen thing though, if it can work with no glasses at all, that's a reason.

Btw, lots of 120hz TVs are capable of displaying 120hz, but not receiving 120hz inputs.

They just display 60hz, but each frame twice (reduces flicker).

See point 4 from the last page.

Fun update - Sky are launching Sky-Sports 3D this weekend with the Man U/Arsenal game in "selected" pubs. The BBC article includes an entertaining picture of a pub full of people wearing 3D glasses.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8483136.stm

("Selected" being "nine").

Local pub landlord mentioned something like this to me a while back, can't recall what he said about the outcome of it all, though, he was offered a trial of it or summat like that.

They said on the radio 'Hang on, don't they already do 3D football? It's called "going to the match".'

Do you have to stumble around the pub wearing 3D glasses?

"Ere, that cunt just spilled my blue pint. The red one's fine, though. Strange."

Are they.. beer goggles?

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/3dtv- ... -years-ubi

Meanwhile, more than five years after its mainstream availability, penetration rates for HDTV remain at -- what? 30-50%? Idiot.

Indeed. I'll venture that the reason 75% of HDTV owners own an HDTV is that they were upgrading to LCD/Plasma and HD now comes as standard. When I change the TV in our bedroom, it will be HD (with no HD input) because it is harder to buy a non HDTV than one that is.

People have made the upgrade to LCD now, I don't think they will jump to 3D in droves, but quite possibly, when this TV goes bang, they will consider the option when replacing.

Every manufacturer is putting 3D in the top couple of models this year (or in Sony's case, the top half dozen of 4 million models they're selling). They just need a year or two to recoup the plasma/LCD technology improvements and it becomes free to include (and only £150 per pair of specs, none of which will come in the box unlike this year).

Reading reviews of the first plasmas and LCDs, there are significant benefits for 2D material as well; particularly plasma as Panasonic have had to develop entirely new phosphor tech with much shorter retention. Less so, but still measurable, for LCD. hdtvtest gave the Panny plasma their 'reference' award and called it amongst the very best of the TVs they've looked at it's so good.

I like that - I'm not arsed about 3D in the slightest but if I try buying a telly again in the next year, it'll be a 3D Panny plasma I reckon because my eyes are fucking annoying bastards.