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!
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.
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.
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.
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