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Sony Teases 3D Playstation 3
Ars Technica has a brief report from CES, where Sony demonstrated the work they've done to bring 3D technology to the PS3. Quoting:
"The idea was just to show the technology to people, to see if they would be interested in sitting at home, wearing a dorky set of black glasses, watching content in 3D. I couldn't pry details about how the 3D affect was achieved, or if the display could turn any source into 3D, but what's clear is that, glasses or no, the 3D affect is amazing. Sony showed off Wipeout HD running in true 3D, and I was ready to whip out my credit card right there. Frank and I both agreed, this was one of the best demos of 3D technology we have ever seen."
Do we really need to move on from HDTV already?
HDTV lag has yet to be solved, meaning tons of old game consoles must be played with input delay. HDTVs are also still too expensive for many people to afford. And once you buy an HDTV, you need something that outputs in HD, digital cable, a Blu-Ray machine, a PS3, those aren't cheap either.
I still use my SDTV for gaming or watching DVDs as upscan converters or scalers look horrible on my HDTV. Because HDTV lag and upscaling are problems I am forced out of necessity to keep an SDTV around to play old video games without lag.
I would rather see HDTVs perfected than a move to 3D.
... they do something?
At first I was only a little incredulous that someone loved Sony products so much, but then I saw the dead give-away:
You got greedy.
Do we really need to move on from HDTV already?
I'd say we haven't moved to HDTV at all.
Not a lot of people I know actually have an HDTV. They are indeed still expensive, but more importantly, they don't really offer anything that people need or want. The difference between standard TV and HDTV is just not large enough for people to actually care about.
HD-DVD is already dead and Blu-Ray doesn't seem to be doing all that well either. More evidence that people just don't care.
What I'm hoping for is some actual innovation when it comes to television. On-demand streaming content, where I am no longer dependent of the exact time a tv show is aired, is a feature I'm missing. 3DTV sounds interesting to me as well. I'm certainly more likely to buy a new TV for those new features, than just to get crappy reality tv shows in a slightly higher resolution.
There was a demo by NVidia for this kind of technology for any PC game earlier this week. It apparently uses the Z buffer information and glasses with active shutters. This is likely something similar.
So is it just me or does this bear a striking resemblance to Nvidia's recent demo of shutter glasses combined with a 120Hz HDTV. To me the black glasses are a dead giveaway.
As far as the "any source" part is concerned, let's not be silly here, you need concrete depth information. Sure our brains can infer this information but the sheer processing grunt required for a computer to do this means it will not be done any time soon at least not in realtime on full motion video.
I am embarrassed for Ars Technica and more than a little disappointed.
It's the top result returned from this search.
"There are no facts, only interpretations." --Friedrich Nietzsche.
Seriously, anything that can get some more decent exclusives for Sony is a good thing. I bought my PS3 two years ago hoping for a lot. And so far I've used it mostly as a blu-ray player only. Metal Gear Solid 4 was good, as was Warhawk (Little Big Planet is supposedly cool too, but I haven't played it). But, other than that, it's mostly ports of games that end up looking and playing better on the cheaper Xbox 360 (and it doesn't help that I like Xbox Live and the Xbox controller better too). As a big fan of Second Life, I even had high hopes for Playstation Home. But even that ended up being a huge disappointment.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
This may be in your country, at least in sweden it's pretty much impossible to buy a TV set not capable of at least 720p. Most people I know already have at least 720p.
In my country (the alleged disposable consumer driven hell of the USA) most (by a HUGE margin) people have TVs over 5 years old, so even though 720p has been pretty much the only option for any non-really small TV for a couple of years, still the vast majority of people have SDTV.
4 years ago my parents purchased a 30" SDTV for $299, 2.5 years ago I purchased a 32" HDTV for $800, theirs is just as tall, so TV shows are the same size (but not as nice looking, this ignore the wide screeniness, since TV is still shot for 4:3).
Expensive compared to what?
Compared to the TV you already own they are incredibly expensive.
Sure, and upscaled DVDs looks as good as blueray also. Have you ever seen HDTV material? It's very easy to see the difference. Even my GF complains about the picture when there is a good movie to watch and we only bought the DVD, the blueray was sold out when we bought the latest Narnia. If you're used to HD material DVD looks like shit, no definition at all.
This is very true, but I still don't own a Blu-Ray player because of cost (price of disks primarily).
In fact the only "HD" content I now watch are upscaled DVDs, and that is when I put in the effort to press the button on the remote.
I generally watch SD Digital cable (the WORSE picture imaginable), and the zoom it, since it is 4:3 letter-boxed usually. This looks awful, but it saves me a lot of money every month.
When I lived closer to a city, I had no cable and watched OTA. This looked great, and I miss it, but not as much as I miss one lunch purchased out a week, or 3-4 TV season boxed sets a year ($240 month savings).
I also watch a lot of DVD's that are 480P progressive scan xvid, and then converted to 2500kps DVDs, with all settings towards speed, not quality. They looks terrible, but I get a lot on a disk, which is nice since my player has trouble with DVD-RW.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
In 2006 Ken Kutaragi proclaimed that with the PS3 came "4D gaming". It seems that his retirement from Sony in August 2007 has stripped the PS3 of 2 entire dimensions. Sony engineers have only now been able to recover one of the lost dimensions via the use of specialised goggles, and it is not clear if the PS3 will ever return to 4D status.
When asked for comment, Mr Kutaragi noted that "Dimensions are but an illusion. Inside all of our souls is the true energy of dimensionality," before deep-throating the microphone and phasing back into the universe from whence he came.
For LCD HDTVs, most of the input lag comes from all the processing hardware, not the LCD panel itself. Many TVs now come with a "game mode" that disables certain processing features to decrease lag time at the expense of noise reduction, or upscaling quality, or whatever.
When I play Guitar Hero on my Sony LCD TV, I get about 60ms lag with the TV in its normal operating mode (as measured by GH's lag compensation feature). When I enable game mode on my TV, the lag effectively drops to zero. With game mode enable, many of the picture optimization features are not available, but that doesn't generally bother me since I usually disable them anyway.