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Sony Developing 3D Screen-Sharing Technology For Two Players
Stoobalou writes "Sony has recently published patent applications which will allow two-player 3D gaming on a single screen. The new technology could spell an end to split-screen gaming, but is unlikely to see the light of day for a few years at least. Sony's method would allow player one to see frames one and three whilst player two would see frames two and four. Current technology requires a display with a 120 Hz refresh rate so it seems likely that we'll have to wait for 240Hz screen technology to become commonplace before two-player 3D becomes a reality. PDF versions of the two applications are available."
Screw that, i'll stick to my elaborate connection of SCART splitters, phono leads, 2 TVs and some black paper with some sticky Blu-tack.
Get off my lawn, Future.
I'd imagine there are already stereoscopic patents for normal, single, left & right eye angles to create the 3D appearance. With what the article suggests, these angles have only been widened by a couple meters. Wouldn't this basically be the same patent at a different angle?
So, no more sociable gaming sessions where a couple of people take their turn race/fight/whatever and other people watch.
I suppose as long as the game also supports a traditional split screen mode, it'll still work out -- and that mode will have to continue to exist for quite a while, as long as many people don't have 3D hardware.
3D Porn on frames 2 and 4 will be the standard.
Somebody get a patent on 2 player games in 2d, where player 1 sees frame 1, and player 2 sees frame 2.
**TODO** Steal someone elses sig.
Sony was the target of a 3D patent in 2004:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/04/mckool_smith_lawsuit_update/
Their legal department might be trying to recuperate their costs now by suing others. It's a game that benefits no one. Meanwhile, Sony is part of the MPEG-LA consortium that's preventing free software and SMEs from including support for MPEG video formats, so they deserve no good will.
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/MPEG_video_formats
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Harm_to_standards_and_compatibility
When a video doesn't play, or when a company expresses doubt about supporting a free format, it's due to MPEG-LA.
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It is just multiple shutter glasses running at 240+ hertz. Frame one is in the right eye of player one, frame two in the right eye of player two, frame three in the left eye of player one, and frame four in the left eye of player two.
What would be better would be normal multi-player with shutter glasses. (example: in a 4 player game every player sees only their frames and cannot see the other players pov. A person w/o a set of glasses would see a set of blurry images.)
I'm wary of patients too, but can this really happen. I understand lawyers are paid to fight their clients corner and not pay attention to anything else. Could any one give examples of one widely used feature being banned or avoided due to a superficial similarity with a newer patented technology.
I'm working now on gathering software patent info related to Sony.
* http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Sony
Help welcome.
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My brain hertz.
The LCD blinds goggles for 3D gaming reduce perceived screen brightness by half.
It seems this invention would reduce it by 3/4.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
It's not about patents restricting use of split screen gaming (which has been around since the 1980's). It's simply about the technology being made obsolete.
If your comment was serious, I think it's just a misunderstanding: they're not suggesting the patent would prevent split-screen gaming, but rather that companies may choose to implement full-screen 2-player rather than split-screen if the technology takes off, leading to the death of the latter. Whether or not that constitutes progress I leave to the reader.
"Yes, Virginia, there is a Great Cthulhu..."
Yeah, read that right. Player 1 sees frames 1 and 4, Player 2 sees frames 2 and 5 and Player 3 sees frames 3 and 6. Hold up, I'm having a Gillette moment here.
That's right assholes. Five blades^H^H^H^H^H^Hplayers.
I imagine the specialized goggles needed for this would be more expensive than just getting a second monitor.
I hate to jump on the anti-3D bandwagon (I actually really enjoyed Avatar despite the plot) but why in the past 2 years is there a sudden jump towards 3D (Nintendo, Nvidia/ATI, Sony, TV companies, etc)?
Shutter glasses running that fast but skipping every other frame means that each eye would see only 1 out of 4 frames. I am guessing with so little "on" time, it will start to damage perceived image persistence and it is likely the brain will start to notice flicker. The image would also seem to be 1/4 brightness instead of 1/2 brightness like a single 3D image. Then add that with a single view (player), the two images are very similar in brightness and appearance. But if you interleave that with another totally different view that could be very different in brightness and/or appearance, it will complicate matters even further.
Although a cool idea, it also seems kinda obvious... but that never seems to stop patenting.
I'm not sure I can ever remember a time when I suddenly stopped playing an FPS game because the "3D simulation on a 2D screen" wasn't immersive enough for me - but I can remember stopping many games because they were crap.
Likewise, I cannot remember staring at a movie in the cinema or on a TV screen and not feeling immersed enough due to flat screen images - but I can remember walking out of crap movies in cinemas or turning off crap DVDs.
I'm also old enough to remember movies like Jaws 3D which were released *SPECIFICALLY* to showcase 3D but were ultimately crap movies... Avatar was very pretty, I'm pleased I saw it but was ultimately just a series of graphical set pieces strung together by a simple plot.
3D in entertainment is a gimmick & marketing tool, nothing more. It turns everything into eye candy which means your brain spends more time looking at stuff rather than wondering about the quality of the plot and the content - if you look at most stuff that's released as entertainment these days, it's clear to see quality standards have dropped, everything now is about marketing and branding.
And as such, the technology companies are in the pay of the entertainment companies to force 3D on consumers so they can continue to churn out mainstream rubbish remakes.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
This is obvious if I ever heard of such. Billions of dollars of R&D, and a grade schooler could come up with this. Oh well, just means I will have less "real" competition next year.
By the way you might not want to get too comfortable using their features they are known for just "ripping" them out later on.
I thought a requirement for patents was for the 'idea' to be non-obvious to a skilled professional in the field.
I don't work in the field of display technology, but the second I read the headline I knew how it could be achieved with a trivial modification to the LCD shutter glasses.
Using existing channel separation to (shock!) separate channels is really so obvious that I would never even imagine to apply for a patent. The US Patent Office should have lost its right to handle patents long ago, as they are only hurting society with their "we grant everything" attitude. They are not capable at all.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
You realize that by only seeing half the frames produced by the TV, even if the resulting video appears to be 30fps in 3D, will by default be half the brightness of the original TV, not counting whatever light reduction (and you thought 3D glasses were dark already!) you get from the fancy 3D glasses.
Eventually you're going to hit a point where you just say, "you know, let's just spring for the twin-screen 720p display glasses" for $1000 and call it a day. $700 for a pair of video glasses a decade ago was stupid money, now it's looking like a much better option for 3D.
Fun fact: movie theater projectors only project light on the screen 50% of the time; the other half of the time is spent with the shutter closed while the film progresses to the next frame.... you just make up for the 50% reduction in light by using a $150 xenon bulb the size of a NFL regulation football that has to be handled with gloves, full face mask and shrapnel suit -> cool youtube video example (not me!) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVpD8SWzKFM DLP projectors are much more efficient since about 90% of the light makes it to the screen (the mirrors are always moving, but there's still the color wheel) so they can use a smaller bulb.
moox. for a new generation.
Seems like a pretty cool idea to me. Especially in games where you get a much better experience will a full screen view (driving, exploring, platform, 3d, hell anything really)
The thought of a four player gauntlet type game where each player sees a view centred around their own player (and only the areas of the game where they have visited) would be pretty nifty and would encourage communication between players sitting on the sofa rather than having to contend with a bunch of 13 year olds shouting obscenities on Xbox Live.
I appreciate that other people wouldn't be able to watch, but then I've always found that pretty boring after a while. The fun to me has always been in the playing.
It's a shame the TV I'm about to buy isn't 3D and only 50Hz, but it'll take a few years before this matures anyway.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
I also don't know enough about big companies and their risk avoidance behaviour. It may well be this patent would ensure companies avoid the technique to insure them self's against risk, however negligible.
This seems too obvious to be patentable to me. But then again, most patents do seem too obvious to me. Am I the only one that thinks this?
Give me full screen 2- or 4- player! If you can get 2-player now with 120Hz, do that! Stereographic 3D is a gimmick; 4 person full screen deathmatch is PURE AWESOME.
Seriously, if you can do 3D using two frames, make that other frame for another player. You could print money with that gaming technology.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
I'm pretty sure that I saw people doing this on the Meant to be seen DIY forums (http://mtbs3d.com/phpBB/viewforum.php?f=26) quite some time back. In that case they did use two different consoles plugged into the different machines of course; and they used polarized glasses. It might be that this is supposed to be a complete system for it. (All the way from console rendering the frames to syncing the glasses.)
As an aside I can recommend anyone who has access to an old "silver screen" to make their own 3D projector setup. Just bring a couple of disposable 3D glasses from a movie, tear one pair apart and put the different glasses over two different projectors. (It seems like you need DLP projectors as LCD tend to have different polarization on the different colors.) (And if you separate the lenses completely you could make your own set of "split screen glasses" to play.)
How can you patent that? Where is the innovation?
+ ... who want's to wear glasses or goggles? NOT ME!
For all of you armchair geniuses saying these are obvious and/or invalid patents...why don't you file a challenge instead of whining on here? Every time we hear about a patent on Slashdot, I see a lot of people say a patent is obvious or that there's prior art, but I never hear about anyone sending a letter to the USPTO or to an organization like the EFF (which I believe has both technical & legal knowledge to form an opinion as to the validity of a patent).
"Using a screen made for displaying two pictures at the same time, to display two DIFFERENT pictures at the same time.
Yeah, f*cking innovative, guys.
This isn't even a software patent. I guess when people said that only software patents are stupid, real world patents are fine, Sony and the Patent Office decided to prove them wrong.
I'm wary of patients too
Oh my, i'll know not to go to you when "3D damages my eyes".
At last I'll be able to show movies to horses and they won't see the flicker.
But will they see the Flicka? Oh wait, that was Fox, not Sony.
It's the refresh rate that's difficult, not extrapolating from alternate frames = 2 eyes to every 4th frame = 4 eyes = 2 players.
If not, I would like to hereby stake my claim to n-player 3D technology, requiring every 2n frame to be shown to a given eye and a n*120mhz refresh rate.
Also the cheapy version: n-player 2D, with glasses that show the same thing to both eyes, each pair of glasses displays every nth frame and only requires a n*60hz refresh rate.
If these work the same way that stereoscopic gaming glasses worked in the past, expect to see a 50% dimming effect in your games since half of the time light will be filtered from your field of vision.
bluHatter
Most of us don't have four figures USD to file a challenge. That's why we sketch out the challenge on Slashdot so that someone who actually makes and sells these things can file the challenge for us.
Cute idea, it could realistically mean 2D for two different people already. Feel real' sorry for the onlookers though. Stereoscopy is headache-inducing enough when the images flicker back and forth but two different images would give anyone a seizure.
By the time 240hz come around (only see it happening with DLP with multiple synced projectors) you could even have 4 players seeing a different 2D image.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
How much cheaper will one 240Hz display be than two 120Hz displays - which will have the advantage of avoiding the dimming already mentioned? And extends to 3, 4, N players without further dimming or even higher frequency displays. And can be used for two separate games/programs if you are not in two-player mode.
Stereo is necessary because you cannot put your eyeballs in different places.But you can (and often do) put two players in different places.
Yawn
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
What if they made a game where both 3D views were meant to be seen by the same player? It would add a second layer to the main game - like that game where you can only see ghosts through your camera. You could have the ordinary world, then flip a switch on your shutter glasses and you can see a second world layered on top. Like jumping between worlds in Silent Hill.
There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
I had this idea bloody ages ago back when I first saw 3d glasses for graphics cards, and told some of my mates, if you had two sets of glasses instead ...' etc.
one of them had even already thought of it themselves, but of course we weren't going to implement it ourselves.
not then anyway we were just small fry, plus it was a 'wouldn't it be cool if' idea. the graphics card manufacturers were
already pushing the boundaries to the limits at the time so it was an idea for the future.
pity i forgot about it till now.
still, we can't have been the only people who have thought of this over the years. hundreds of kids and gamers would have had very similar ideas - it's hardly a novel idea it's just an obvious extension of the technology.
yet, it will now be patented by one bloody company and the rest of the world will pay through the nose for it.
Why not something innovative like...
Player 1 sees frame 1 NOT in 3d.
Player 2 sees frame 2 NOT in 3d
Player 3 sees frame 3 NOT in 3d
Player 4 sees frame 4 NOT in 3d.
Why? so all 4 players get the full screen for playing. eliminates the tiny square in the corner effect and makes the game a lot more fun for multi player.
also it eliminates the douchebaggery of friends that look at the other windows to see where you are.
3d is worthless, give us real advances in gaming.
this also could be used for regular TV. I watch Show 1, the wife can watch Show 2 with headphones on.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Every now and then, a new gimmick comes along and everybody goes nuts until it quietly fades away. I'm old enough to remember the "Sensurround" releases of the seventies. For a while, nearly every movie was "released in Sensurround." 3D movies are the new Sensurround or maybe old3D. Sooner or later, movie goers will get their fill of the gimmick and start thinking hard about the 3D premium on their tickets. Eventually, this too will fade.
Sony's patent, while hideously obvious, might last longer if it can be implemented well without too much loss of brightness. I suspect though, that with the reported problems caused by the technology with people's perception of "true-life" 3D, the lawyers will kill it eventually anyway.
Mary Pickford notwithstanding, This is the third big wave of 3D movies.
What is different this time?
Of course, that's just about the situation already except in the case of a few notable exceptions. It's easier for devs to just insist multiplayer is online or requires two consoles on a LAN (not to mention more profitable to require two copies of the game) than it is to optimise for split-screen multiplayer. This has been the de facto position for a while now, the bigger question would be whether this new technology can revive multiplayer on a single console or whether it will simply replace split screen as the niche offering of a handful of games.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/sony_rootkit
never forget, never forgive
That shouldn't be necessary as prior art is a defence to patent infringement, and there must be literally thousands (or at the very least hundreds) of examples of split-screen games that pre-date the patent.
And everyone else who is watching just feels nauseous.
You could be right about them being hardware patents. (I was wrong before, regarding the CSIRO patents, which seem to be hardware patents.)
The point of documenting the situation is so that we can evaluate just once, write it down with the reasoning, and have clarity for the next time.
What parts of the patents seem to imply they're tied to hardware?
Could I infringe them by writing new software and using it with standard hardware? (If so, then they're software patents)
Help very welcome.
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
By the Sonystyle page it appears that all Sony's 3d tv's are already 240hz.
I suppose "$" plus "180" counts as four figures
For one thing, that's $180 for submitting the information, plus more money for knowing how the USPTO wants these things phrased. (See the old story about knowing which screw to turn.) For another, it applies only to information submitted "within two months from the date of publication of the application". The ordinary reexamination process and fee apply after that point.
I bet you could even get a dollar from a hundred and eighty Slashdot posters.
Even after the payment processing fees?
So, two months from now, when you haven't done anything
What should I do if I become aware of prior art after the two-month window after publication has passed? For example, I know of prior art from the Commodore 64 era that may invalidate Namco's patent on minigames during video game loading screens, but I wasn't aware of the patent itself until over a year after it was issued. If the choice is between whining and eating vs. challenging and starving, I don't rush to blame someone who chooses whining and eating.
You can use a credit card
The merchant needs a web site (with hosting fee per year), an SSL certificate from a well-known certificate authority (with fee per year), and a merchant account and payment gateway (with fee per month, per transaction, and per dollar).
send a check
With a stamp. How many people are going to take the time to write a $1 check and then spend 44 cents for U.S. first-class postage or (worse) far greater international postage and currency conversion fees to mail it?
or even a money order.
With a money order fee and a stamp.
These are application publications, not issued patents. In fact, the patent office hasn't even assigned an examiner to look at these applications, much less actually judged them on their merits.
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
Why is this any kind of news? I saw and used this years ago demoed by NVIDIA at Quakecon.
I have to agree. I remember having this exact same idea 5 or 6 years ago. I considered looking into whether this was patented or not already but, I assumed that someone would have thought of this already.
Honestly, it's really the same thing as existing technologies. Instead of building shutters for 2 eyes, you build them for 4. It seems like patenting putting an extra seat in a car to me.
Now this, I'm excited about. However, with the recent announcement that 3D PS3 games are going to be limited to 720p, I imagine we're either not seeing this on the PS3, it's going to be limited even more in framerate and res, or all of the above.
My new patent will allow Player 1 to see frames 1 and 3 ... while Player 1's subconscious to see frames 2 and 4.
Sony is good. PS3 is good. Blueray is good. Sony is good. PS3 is good. Blueray is good.