Slashdot Mirror
The Future Of 3D
tlb writes: "I found an article regarding the future of 3D at Beachside Tech. The article discussed 3D is movies and the internet as well as video games. It seems interactive 3D objects are becoming more popular for web use. There's also some history in it, and some info on technologies from Nvidia."
... until they give us text-mode 3D acceleration. Lynx users wont be ignored!
3D is going away for a while, bayyy-beee.
Seems bigger better faster is too mainstream for us folk.
White text on a beige background, so bring your spectacles. Oh, and you need JS on. Or you could just type in
http://www.beachsidetech.com/perfection1.htm
perfection2.htm etc.
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
In his nvidia section he only lists the riva chipset and then jumps to the geforce in the next section. He completely forgot about the rivatnt and the rivatnt2(and all of its related chipsets like the ultra and m64)
First Yahoo! in the porn industry, and now nvidia as well? :)
karma capped
Imagine if you had a system, where you used two movies, layed one on top of the other. It would look blury of course, but if the viewer were to wear a pair of expensive, high-tech filter glasses (having differently coloured lenses), a stereoscopic 3-D image could be achieved. I bet in 2 years time we could have a working proto-type, and then actually bring it to market within 10 years given the proper funding and agressive marketing.
Hmmmm. My cookie for this page: "What people have been reduced to are mere 3-D representations of their own data." -- Arthur Miller
Stefan.
The truth shall make you fret. (Ankh-Morpork tImes motto)
From the article:
> At least for now it is. As the great gods of
> technology continue to design new, unparalleled
> computing power, the detail will only become
> greater.
I really don't agree that the advancement of hardware is the main reason that 3D is becoming, or will become, more and more realistic. Fact of it is, us humans still haven't quite nailed down how to duplicate reality. Skin in FF looked plastic because we still don't know how to render skin well. They looked stiff when they ran because we still don't know how to add in the subtleties of movement. They looked fake when they talked because we still haven't mastered expressions.
I mean, people were doing production TV shows with Amiga's and Video Toasters a decade ago.. and that hardware couldn't hold a candle to today's machinery. It's not strictly hardware. I think 3d animation will only become more realistic once we've gotten better at figuring out how lighting works, how creatures move, and all the subtleties involved.
Im sure it would give advertisers a better chance to piss you off. Especially if everythings physically real like in the holodeck - "please register this program, the override and safety protocols have been locked out, note the walls are closing in on you. To pay, simply scream as loud as possible, and your voice print will be taken as id for the credit transfer. You now have 30 seconds to pay."
Bring on the realistic shooting innocent people in the street simulations and natalie portman pr0n models!!!!!!
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
IMAX is the best example for showing that 3D is not what consumers really want. IMAX in both Australia and New Zealand is in big financial problem. Even if we have the technology, it means nothing unless there's an application for it. Entertainment has to be entertaining. And spinning lots of 3D objects around is not. Unless they have contents for such, virtual reality DVD and TV are just going to go the way of IMAX.
Imagine if you had a system, where you used two movies, layed one on top of the other. It would look blury of course, but if the viewer were to wear a pair of expensive, high-tech filter glasses (having differently coloured lenses), a stereoscopic 3-D image could be achieved. I bet in 2 years time we could have a working proto-type, and then actually bring it to market within 10 years given the proper funding and agressive marketing.
3D movies have existed for quite a while. Ancient systems used colour-filter glasses to get 3D. Other ancient systems used various tricks to get limited 3D effects in full colour. The Right Way to show a 3D movie is to have two projectors running films shot for each eye, put polarized filters on the projectors, and use polarized glasses to look at the resulting image. My understanding is that this is the way 3D movies are shown now, though I don't keep up with the industry (and so could easily be mistaken).
For computers, the nicest way of doing 3D is to display alternate eyes on alternate frames, and use LCD shutter-glasses to decode it. You can buy packages for this off the shelf from several vendors; they work by replacing the rendering driver with one that renders two images and handles the synchronization of the glasses. These have existed for a while.
Now, the fact that both of these solutions have existed for a while, but that neither of these have really caught on, should tell you the most important thing:
Nobody really cares about true 3D for most entertainment or gaming applications.
If they did, stereographic glasses would have sold like hotcakes when they were first introduced.
A flat projection of a 3D world seems to be enough for most viewers, despite the industry's repeated attempts to provide something more.
When everything is 3D it makes it hard to start a small (free) game project. I can make a game look about as good as a super nintendo if I take the time, but anything beyond that is out of reach for a single developer who can't spend all of his time on side projects.
I hope that people will think "oh, i get it, it's retro," but I'm afraid people instead just frown at the low res and 2D.
Also, SDL is great to work with, but I always run into performance issues with it.
Cryptnotic
My other first post is car post.
Seconded. Dull info, amateur/sloppy writing.
Take this example:
This July, Final Fantasy: The Spirit Within was released. With it, came the most glorious 3D CG in history. <snip> The level of detail is unsurpassed to all previous movies. At least for now it is.
Leaving aside the gorgeous grammar ("unsurpassed to"?), then quite apart from anything else, if FF's 3D CGI surpasses all previous movies, then it always will. If a wonderful new 3D CGI movie is released that surpasses FF, then it won't be a "previous movie", will it?
Aside from such scrappy writing, he also missed out TNT/TNT2 chipsets in his 'history' of nVidia's products. TNT was a massive improvement in fill-rate - the first time you could really run a game at 1024x768 and higher without huge slowdowns.
And all that "I still remember when Nvidia was the new kid on the block" - wow, he can remember a whole few years..? He can't actually remember enough to tell us why the Riva was not as good as 3dfx - just some vague comment that the 3dfx looked better. The Riva was a pretty buggy part - it had horrible seaming problems. nVidia introduced the TNT to developers as "an apology from us for how bad the Riva was".
When I got to the end of the article, I was left wondering why the hell it got onto the front page of slashdot - basically all the article said was:
"3D is the coolest! And it's going to get cooler! Have you seen the Sharper Image site? Hot dog! I'm gonna get me some nVidia lovin'!"
Harsh but fair, methinks.
Tim
Macromedia released Director 8.5 with 3D support. It has a tool for creating interactive 3D using Lingo (the Director language). Most of the stuff that's being produced is kinda crappy, but you should check out the Lego site for an awesome example of a game. More to come, you can be sure...
Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest. -- Mark Twain
It takes a computer days to produce what a polaroid can do in minutes.
Seriously, the more I see about photo realism the more I wonder how much more effective it would be to just edit real photographs taken by a decent photographer.
I'm all for photo realism in animation, but for stills it seems like a waste of perfectly good film. I'm not a neo-luddite, but most of this eye candy could have been done with photoshop and a real photo in a fraction of the time.
I'm suprising some people at CMU with this idea...
Easy way to do this:
Picture the 3d space as its imagination.
And using a camera, it takes pictures of RL and represents it in its imagination.
Suddenly we have context... lots of good stuff goes with it... just a ton of work.
http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~sager/
God spoke to me
Aside from the occasional driver hiccup that causes the card to fold in on itself and become a singularity on the space-time continuum, the future of 4-D gaming looks very promising!
If you add a door in plan, it updates in sectiton and perspective. The next release of Autocad and Microstation should both support this in full (according to what I've heard).
Currently, at the firm I work for (RTKL - 1500 world wide), they do things by standard CAD drawings. They spend hours updating drawings with minor changes. The wonder of 3d chat or real time 3d interaction isn't the most exciting thing here. The most exciting thing to me is revolutionizing the workflow of traditional media types, especially in architecture, interior design, and industrial design.
// john athayde
# x@boboroshi.com
# http://www.boboroshi.com/
Current technology is even more advanced than you imagined! With current 3d graphics you don't even have to be a grandma to scare yourself to death.
This article is a prime example of why God gave us web designers. White text on light blue background? Yeah, right.
Visit sunny Knowumsayin.com, home of the pork shirt.
This web site was so horribly researched, so shallow on actual content, and so terribly written, that I expect it was probably done by Slashdot.
:)
:)
NaN, the Dutch company behind Blender, released a browser plugin last week so that you can run real 3D apps (created with Blender) right in the browser. Blender isn't authorware with 3D tacked on (like Director), it's the real deal, even having its own built-in game engine. At $299, the Blender Player Tools will cost a fraction of what people can expect to shell out for Director.
I agree about the quality of the writing - he should get someone who can write to edit his page before it goes live... (e.g. 'lead' for 'led' on the first page).
Yes, it's Christopher Tomas!
from the article: "and Pamela Anderson's breasts won't be appearing in anyone's Java applet for some time yet either"
;-)
;-)
Too bad... I'd really love to see my Konq with some 3d embedded Anderson boobies and browse my ass off
But he's right... by the time the technology is that advanced, you don't want those anymore... they will be hanging UNDER your monitor (or whatever device is displaying them)...
And maybe someone to add some content too...
Why are we being pointed at this? This is essentially a cheesy sunday suppliment article with a few screenshots and a bit of badly (if at all-) researched commentary on the bleedin (obvious) edge of 3D gfx.
I'd be genuinely interested to read something NEW on this subject, some new insights, some well researched comparisons of TS, TS2 and FF in terms of polygons/second on screen etc... That would be interesting, I'd regurgitate that in the pub, but this!
Anyone got some decent articles to point us at??
From the site - ;-)
Howdy guys! I'm happy to report I've been Slashdotted!
LoL! That must be one of the few guys in this world who'd be happy on a fancy DoS attack
I'm hitting the same brick wall with a small free game project. If it ain't 3D, people don't want to see it.
Which is a crying shame, cause every 3D game there is now has to be put together by a commitee of people - which means no common vision. Always. That is why games suck nowadays.
"Anybody remotely interesting is mad, in some way or another" - Doctor Who