Games Has 3D gaming failed already?

[cHodAX]

EA seem to think so, they are shifting development from 3D over to social gaming because the former isn't showing profitability.

EA CEO John Riccitiello has spoken about EA's plans to move away from 3D, and towards social and online gaming.

"We see really high returns in these markets and very poor returns focusing on 3D, so we are allocating our resources toward new innovations," Riccitiello told stockholders at EA's annual meeting.

"Frankly we have not seen a big uptake for 3D gaming. We have not seen a big uptake in 3D TVs in the home, at least not yet. We are not here trying to drive a market. We are here to react to what consumers are looking for."

He also spoke about the problems faced by Nintendo’s 3DS.

"It was perceived to be the next big thing, there were complaints about is causing headaches and nausea and all sorts of things. Frankly, it didn't do that for me, but there were complaints, and it's not performed as well as they would like."

Well I think most of us could have told EA that 3-4 years ago when the big 3D push started, we all know the truth is that the technology just isn't comfortable to use over long periods which is exact the workload gamers expect. 3DS tried and failed, most people I know who bought one either have 3D turned off or on minimal setting because of headaches. Friends with PS3 and 3D televisions all admit that it is just a gimmick and not usable for medium to long gaming sessions. The only person I know who is happy is a PC gamer with a top end Nvidia setup, maybe because it all runs at higher frame and refresh rates? Certainly the 3D demo that Nvidia gave this year at The Gadget Show live was much easier on the eye than any other 3D that I tried that day.

 

[Ormorof]

true, i think its a bit of a fad

at least until they can do some sort of total immersion virtual reality, i saw on years and years ago (90's) at an electronics store in Denmark, where you could play with a headset and on a treadmill with a nintendo style gun, it was a "custom" made set up i think but still pretty cool demo, with the improved processing power of consoles etc and addition of kinect style technology that could be quite cool (though me being a fat lazy bastard i will still sit on my butt to play thank you very much )

 

[Shagrat]

There was a place in nottingham that was like that, they had four pods and you played in a custom made fantasy environment.

It was hilarious, they had the mics working so that if you were a dwarf your voice was deeper, and if your were an elf you sounded like joe pasquale.

gang of us spent a lot of time playing it, was great fun, really immersive when working on puzzles and stuff, even though the graphics were quite basic.

 

[old.user4556]

*dusts down cynical 'I hate 3D' soapbox*.

Cunts. 3D fucks me off because it's simply a vehicle to sell us more shite we don't need and to charge more at the cinema (plus the anti-piracy angle). It's got cunt-all to do with a better exprience. Hell, we've got fuck-all HD content on terrestrial and you need to go to Sky for a reasonable HD service.

Have you watched a 3D TV for a long period of time? Hard on the eyes and uncomfy, not to mention the woeful 3D implementation by TV manufacturers which gives nasty ghosting and 'crosstalk' that make the otherwise awesome HD picture look wank.

Get your fucking HD content sorted before worrying about 3D - BASTARDS.

 

[Rulke]

The only legit use for 3D tellies is so you can play multiplayer games on 1 TV and both see your own thing

 

[kirennia]

The only person I know who is happy is a PC gamer with a top end Nvidia setup, maybe because it all runs at higher frame and refresh rates?

I think that applies pretty well here...this 3d stepping stone, even if pretty shitty is still justifiable though.

A classis example for me was Just Cause 2. After having played it on the PS3 for a while, I ended up buying it for the PC and while it looked a little sharper and nicer in parts, I found it only marginally better. The motion blur was one thing which quite frankly made both me and another friend on seperate rigs feel sick with it turned on and it seriously hampered gameplay with frame lag everytime large areas were to be rendered.

Consoles generally do not have good framerates (neither did my PC at the time) for graphics intensive games which would benefit the most from something like motion blurring; as a result, most forms of motion blur in low framerate situations give more a feeling of 'jumping about' rather then speed or whatever they're trying to acheive.

Upon buying a new graphics card, I completely forgot about the motion blur specifically and simply wanted to rag the card so turned everything upto maximum. All of a sudden the whole motion blur concept as an immersive tool made sense. With framerates above the monitors refresh rate, the motion sickness disappeared and instead, the blur was subtle yet gave a lot more to the gameplay. The key was not noticing it as a specific graphics trait of the game but instead having it contribute to the experience; the technology had been realised for me at least. 3d would be helped somewhat by an improved framerate... but that's still only half of the battle.


The problem with the current way 3d is used is that the way a human eye focuses on distance is not being taken into account. We focus on seperate objects at any given time and the human brain/eye will naturally 'de-focus' on areas which we are not looking directly at. Everytime the 3d gets it wrong, it draws you back from the game and into the reality of something not being quite right about what you're looking at. This cannot be broken with the current generation of '3d' gaming but it still isn't a redundant technology.

Take travelling in a car as an example. A lot of people who are travel sick as passengers, aren't as drivers because there is a neurological correlation between hand movements and the signals picked up by the eye. Combining physical movement, not of just the player but of the screen as well is the only way this is going to work. 3d goggles should work in theory to prove the technology but then comes the issue of movement...

2d movement treadmills aren't applicable in the vast majority of homes where 'gamer' incomes are made from and so the technology, even if soundly engineered, would not be pushed on in this respect. A large commercial drive for a commercial version of the product is the only way to get a larger interest in pushing forward the technology...the gaming industry is afterall one of the most influential in pushing boundaries of what can be acheived with a computer. That's why I think it was/is a viable way to try and advance the technology; while I can't think of a decent way of combining the movement and 3d experiences, money has now been invested into doing just that.

It's a bit of a cold way of looking at the reasoning behind releasing all of the current generation 3d shite but ultimately if people weren't stupi.....if people didn't buy it, the technology wouldn't have been pushed to the extent that it has. Ultimately, who doesn't want to see holographics in the future?

 

[Wazzerphuk]

People also forgetting that very, very few customers have the ability to play games in 3D.

 

[Wij]

Any dunce could have worked out that 3D wasn't going to sell many games.

 

[ilaya]

Content >> Visuals

 

[Billargh]

I for one am completely shocked, I thought 3D was going to be the next big thing.

 

[Ctuchik]

"True" 3D has never really caught on because it requires you to wear those insanely annoying red + green paper "glasses" or for example nVidias way to heavy counterpart...

When they can make true 3D without the use of purpose built glasses of varying quality, then and only then will it be worth investing properly in...

But until that day it's just gonna be a gimmick...

 

[fettoken]

I thought 3D was when you see something from a third dimensional perspective. Not having things fly through the screen, attacking your eyes etc. Guess its just me.

 

[old.Osy]

I thought 3D was when you see something from a third dimensional perspective. Not having things fly through the screen, attacking your eyes etc. Guess its just me.

You're thinking about Wolfenstein 3D.

 

[pikeh]

I get a splitting headache everytime I watch anything 3d, can't be the only one.

 

[Turamber]

Its a gimic, nothing more, nothing less. The majority of films that are in 3D do not make proper use of the medium and I'd imagine gaming is the same. In these days of constricted cashflow I would imagine game designers are seeing little in the way of return for their investment in the technology so have put it on the backburner.

Hopefully cinema will go the same way soon.

 

[ford prefect]

I don't think it is so much a gimmick, more like the industry jumping the gun a little. Until we get affordable 3d tv's and monitors that work well without the need for comedy glasses, the whole thing is never going to have a mass market appeal.

 

[Job]

Immersive is more important than 3 d, though ultimately it would be required to make you think you were actually there, youre gonna need seperate retina projection and eye tracking so you can lock onto close objects to focus and merge, complicated but doable, as I've said many a time, that's the day I fuck off into the vr world never to return

 

[Shagrat]

Immersive is more important than 3 d, though ultimately it would be required to make you think you were actually there, youre gonna need seperate retina projection and eye tracking so you can lock onto close objects to focus and merge, complicated but doable, as I've said many a time, that's the day I fuck off into the vr world never to return

spartacus blood and sand + thinking you are actually there.

that's quite disturbing, tv could be quite....arousing.

 

[Access Denied]

3D will never be viable in it's current guise. As Kirannia put it, it's all about how the eye focuses. 3D today relies on the 3 colours being just out of alignment, this causes problems for the eye because it's trying to focus on more than one thing at a time, plus there's the problem of the 3D portion being see-through. For 3D to be viable it would have to be done with holographics, where the picture is visually solid but projected at the same time.

Of course there are problems with that as well, cost and installation of the emitters being chief among them.

 

[cHodAX]

Not 3D but thought I would post here rather than start a new thread....

‪Unlimited Detail Real-Time Rendering Technology Preview 2011 [HD]‬‏ - YouTube

 

[old.Tohtori]

Saw that too, there's some problems there

One being that nothing is unlimited. What happens to the system when xbox says "we can only handle million atoms"? Suddenly the whole system can produce a worse product then current polygon stuff.

Other is that the problem isn't in polygon counts(100% that is), but with texturing and world immersion. Fallout for example doesn't have huge polygon counts, but if the world is immersive, you forget it.

Don't get me wrong, it'll probably advance graphics, but it's a lot of hype and misconceptions.

On the topic though;

Gimmicks are there, and have been since hollywood starting times, to combat other medias for clientel and it rarely is done with other, better, intentions. 3D could work, as an enhancement. Which it's not at the current.

 

[DaGaffer]

I genuinely don't want to watch anything in 3D again, ever. Captain America was my last attempt and I'm done. It added nothing to the film, made everything murky, I kept getting random reflections from the damn glasses, and eventually it gave me a headache. Its just acceptable (effect-wise) if you sit dead centre in the cinema (middle of the middle row), but anywhere off to one side and it just annoys the fuck out of me.

 

[PLightstar]

The only time I have seen 3D done well, is at the local aquarium in Bristol, they converted an old iMax theater into an aquarium and the screen plays a 3D movie about sea wildlife, with whales and dolphins coming out and swimming in front of you. Every other 3D I have ever watched has been pretty bad in comparison. Pilotwings looked good on the 3DS but I had to be soo close to the screen it was giving me a neck ache.

 

[DaGaffer]

The only time I have seen 3D done well, is at the local aquarium in Bristol, they converted an old iMax theater into an aquarium and the screen plays a 3D movie about sea wildlife, with whales and dolphins coming out and swimming in front of you. Every other 3D I have ever watched has been pretty bad in comparison. Pilotwings looked good on the 3DS but I had to be soo close to the screen it was giving me a neck ache.

I enjoyed Avatar, and unfortunately that rather raised the bar for what we should expect from 3D, but I've seen nothing since that's been remotely as well executed.

Before Avatar, the only time I'd seen good 3D was the T-2 show at Universal Studios in LA, but that was because the whole show, most importantly including the auditorium design, was built around one 3D "experience". Most of the time the problem with 3D is as much the environment you're watching it in as the film itself.

 

[old.Tohtori]

The problem with 3D, even in avatar, was and is that it's mostly pointless.

Something like Tron 2 could've blown ze mind, with it being a virtual reality and anything goes, but they didn't utilise it enough.

In avatar it worked more as a hinderence, breaking the flow of the movie as it went "in your face!" 3D, from the immersion 3D.

Choose a style, immersion or in your face and utilise it.

 

[MYstIC G]

I don't like 3D. Transformers 3 had some 3D in it and I'd describe it mostly as "even more annoying lens flare" with bright lights just flashing awkwardly in your face. It's not a progression in any way shape or form because a flat screen is only ever going to be a flat screen whether Hollywood accept it or not.

 

[megadave]

Not 3D but thought I would post here rather than start a new thread....

‪Unlimited Detail Real-Time Rendering Technology Preview 2011 [HD]‬‏ - YouTube

Oh god I had to mute that, what the fuck is wrong with his voice?

 

[cHodAX]

Oh god I had to mute that, what the fuck is wrong with his voice?

lol I know, it is pretty fucking awful.

 

[Ormorof]

Oh god I had to mute that, what the fuck is wrong with his voice?

i was just thinking that, major douche voice!

 

[Calaen]

I enjoyed Avatar, and unfortunately that rather raised the bar for what we should expect from 3D, but I've seen nothing since that's been remotely as well executed.

Before Avatar, the only time I'd seen good 3D was the T-2 show at Universal Studios in LA, but that was because the whole show, most importantly including the auditorium design, was built around one 3D "experience". Most of the time the problem with 3D is as much the environment you're watching it in as the film itself.

Exactly the same opinion as me, I loved how Immersive Avatar was, I spent so much time looking at the stuff in the background thinking wow that looks amazing.

Problem with it is that they are tagging 3D onto everything atm and most of it is absolute trash, if they would just take a bit more time to make the darn things then everyone would win!

I'm even more annoyed at how much the ceinema prices at my local Odeon have went up!!! I went to see Avatar at the Imax in 3d sitting in the gallery seats for £15. It's now £22 pounds for exactly the same seats they have added a charge for 3D movies, a quiet night out with the lads for a bit of scran and a movie equates to about £15 quid an hour.