I was somewhat saddened to see this story the other day over at Engadget. To the best of my knowledge, Phillips was the biggest company making a market push with autostereoscopic displays. It seems like this technology is headed back to the research labs for now.
That was the depressing image on the WowVX blog. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?
Sometimes the most important parts of a conversation are those that are left unsaid. One of the things I noticed in my week at GDC was how little attention was given to stereoscopic 3D, especially as compared to the CES show only two months prior.
Even with nVidia, a pillars of the graphics industry, making PR waves with their launch of a stereo 3D gaming setup, the game developer community seems to be mostly keeping stereoscopic 3D at arm’s length. The single tutorial of the entire conference on the subject of stereoscopic 3D, given by Blitz Games who developed a “stereoscopic 3D engine” that runs on XBOX360 and PS3, was attended by about 30 people. On the show floor, Sony had two 3D displays, iZ3D had a booth, and it was rumored that nVidia was showing off their 3D gaming rig somewhere, but I never found it. For a technology that is attention grabbing and visual, this is a notably low turnout.
So, does this mean that game developers aren’t embracing stereoscopic 3D as an important advancement in game technology? Or is it just too early, with stereo standards still needing to be set on the display hardware itself? At the Blitz talk, the speaker made the point that gamers drove the HDTV migration, as they were the bridge between the early adopters and the mainstream. If gamers really do represent that valuable bridge market, then why didn’t we see Panasonic, LG, and Samsung making an effort to “wow” game developers with the potential of their stereoscopic 3D technology? Perhaps they deemed the timing to be poor and will be exhibiting in greater force at next year’s GDC. In any event, the impression I get is that all the hype around 3D displays at CES in January may have been slightly premature.
I’m still hoping that I will be gaming in 3D on all of my new XBOX360 games in a year from now, but I am pretty sure that I will have to be more patient than that.
