{"id":2141,"date":"2010-06-08T06:00:34","date_gmt":"2010-06-08T13:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/?p=2141"},"modified":"2010-06-05T15:37:40","modified_gmt":"2010-06-05T22:37:40","slug":"3d-videogames","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/3d-videogames\/","title":{"rendered":"Are Videogames 3-D TV’s Killer App?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I think it’s fair to say that the rollout of 3-D TV this year has been\u2026 confused, to put it mildly. Although the hardware is ready (in the form of 3-D capable HDTVs and Blu-ray players), where is the 3-D content to go with it? The few 3-D Blu-rays pressed to disc so far have all been manufacturer exclusives paired up with the purchase of specific HDTVs or BD players. And that doesn’t look to be changing any time soon. There are few firm release dates for 3-D Blu-rays the rest of this year. How can people get excited about the purchase of a 3-D TV if they don’t have anything 3-D to watch on it? There’s also the matter that many people find 3-D movies to be gimmicky and annoying, and would rather watch those same movies in 2-D anyway. But what about 3-D gaming? Is that a concept we can all get behind?<\/p>\n

<\/h6>\n

I’ll admit that I’m not much of a gamer. I still have my old NES hooked up to my home theater, and would rather play games on that than my PS3. Yet even I find the possibility of racing games or First Person Shooters in 3-D kind of exciting. Isn’t that a natural evolution for these types of games? Other than the need to wear dorky 3-D glasses, can anyone honestly say that they’re not<\/em> at least a little intrigued by the idea of playing the next ‘Call of Duty’ in 3-D?<\/p>\n

Sony already updated the PS3 for 3-D gaming functionality a couple months ago. Even so, just like the situation with movies, there are no 3-D games ready to play on it yet. However, the company has announced that its first four 3-D games<\/a> will be available for download from the Playstation Store in June\u2026 But only in Japan. The U.S. rollout will follow later in the year. <\/p>\n

All four of these games will be 2-D to 3-D conversions, not natively rendered 3-D games. That’s pretty frustrating as well. I’m sure that native 3-D games will follow eventually, though. <\/p>\n

Many 3-D TVs offer their own 2-D to 3-D conversion features. Have any of our readers tested this with games? Does it work well at all, or are the results terrible? Does the conversion add a lag that makes the games unplayable?<\/p>\n

Given that the graphics in all modern videogames are mapped as 3-D CG objects that the game console renders and displays on screen in real time \u2013 and given that the 3-D effect is created by viewing an object from two different “camera” angles simultaneously \u2013 is it possible for the PS3 to be updated to add its own second virtual camera to pretty much any<\/em> game? Is the Cell processor powerful enough for that? If so, would this effectively make it possible for the console to convert any and all existing games to 3-D without the need to purchase dedicated software?<\/p>\n

I’m not even a gamer, but I see a lot of possibilities in this. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I think it’s fair to say that the rollout of 3-D TV this year has been\u2026 confused, to put it mildly. Although the hardware is ready (in the form of 3-D capable HDTVs and Blu-ray players), where is the 3-D content to go with it? The few 3-D Blu-rays pressed to disc so far have…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":2140,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[137,136,144],"tags":[198,204,91,4],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2141"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2141"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2141\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2146,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2141\/revisions\/2146"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2140"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}