disolitude said:
I think that even then its going to be nich-ey. Its all about mass market, casuals casuals casuals!! The thing is that 3D gaming has been available since 2007. Samsung and Mitsubishi supported it since then. Sure I bought a 3D capable TV as did about 4 million other people (nitsubishi said that 3D TV penetration is about 4 mil in north america at CES 2010)...but thats still less than 1% of the market. The site below posted the 3D ready TVs that are coming out for 2010. http://www.3dmovielist.com/3dhdtvs.html Guess what? They are all ubber high end models. Sony XBR series is 3000 +dollars without 3D and 120 hz input... Gone are the sub 1000 dollar 4 series plasmas that Samsung made in 2009 which support 3D. Replaced by the 8 and series plasmas that now cost 2000-3000 dollars without 3D. If cheaper DLP and plasma models got less than 1% of the marketshare, how will these high end models do? Avatar has created this buzz around 3D and everyone is talking about it. 3D blurays are coming, 3d TV shows, 3D world cup even...But this buzz will die down by the time these clowns are ready(talking about the buzz for mainstream people, and not tech fanatics like us). All that will be left at that point is 2000+ dollar TVs that supposedly do "3D" and copies of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs in 3D which 98% of the bluray users are unable to watch cause they dont have the: 100+ dollar glasses, 2000+ dollar TV or 200+ dollar bluray player hich are 3D capable. The more 3D starts to materialize the more I am starting to think that it will be one giant commercial falure. They could not even bother for it to be mainstream. Instead it may become the tech that people use to say to other people "My life is better than your life cause I have 3D TV". |
The big flaw of the whole 3D movement is the glasses. This is where the stupidity of the 3D revolution headed by Sony, Samsung etc lies. Even if it becomes popular the fact that it relies on glasses makes it vulnerable to disruption of this market by a console or similiar technology. Why would people get a 3D TV and 3D glasses when they can very soon get 3D glasses with the display inside the glasses which does 3D even better than a TV ever could? What exactly is Sir Howard Stringer smoking in thinking that people will not simply use an even better technology than the TV for their 3D?
People can keep their old TV sets, the 42" or whatever and simply spend a little more on glasses and get better 3D. I don't see it being that big for the PC as people need to see their keyboards due to the need to sight where they are placing their left hand (most people aren't that great at touch typing IMO), but for a next generation console it can and will be the next big thing. By the time the sets come down in price, the glasses will come down in price too.
If people like to listen to music whilst they work out, then im sure they'll also be pretty keen to surf the internet or watch a movie. In addition to this, the VR type displays can give the illusion that they are running on a real road somewhere they have never been before.
I don't see Nintendo pulling it off because they don't seem so keen for this kind of technology and Sony has their ass up in their own business trying to sell TV's and Stereos so I doubt they will want to. That leaves Microsoft with Xbox and Natal to pull it off. With a voice plus gesture interface people can control the console without actually sighting it, and the NXE is already designed to work perfectly with both your voice and your gestures. The latter I've seen from a video demonstration at CES 2009 and the former is piss easy next to general purpose voice typing and something that even Vista does well.
What I both speculate and hope about is related to 3 different and new variants that are coming for the Xbox 360, 3 new internal code words which are Pure, Slim and something else. What im wondering is if the Xbox 360 will get a graphics upgrade at the end of the year to bring 3D display into reality. The compute shader is incredibly powerful in that you can reuse the products of the previous frame to recreate the next, so it can bring a much more efficient 3D rendering because what you see with your right eye is infact similar to what you see with your left eye and the same geometry can be used and shaders can be re-run whilst still in cache.
Microsoft played chicken with developers in witholding an extra 1GB of space from them. This is where any 3D/forward compatibility will reside. So the same disc can execute differently for different consoles. This is the space taken up by the 'whoops this is in a DVD player you moron, not an Xbox 360' movie. Since developers cannot access the 'metal' a different GPU can take the same requests and execute them. This is almost identical to how DirectX works on the PC. However they can make changes to how the GPU displays those requests and with a little tweaking on the game code every current game game could execute the same graphics code twice (30 per eye). All they would need is an updated GPU like for instance Juniper from ATI which is 800SP with 720 enabled (144 Xbox 360 equivalent) which is precisely the quantity you'd need to render at twice the resolution and at a higher frame rate. For future games they could render at a much higher resolution like 1920 by 1080 with MSAA or edge detect AA OR in 3D at a more standard resolution.
Tease.
