PAX East Wrapup - The 'D' in 3D stands for "dismantlement"

3D glasses just make this look worse

I started this article thinking it would be part II of my PAX East, but instead let's call this an aside. 3D was a significant portion of the PAX showcase this year, and I'm still not 100% buying what Nintendo, Sony, and others are selling. I am NOT saying that 3D is bad. Instead, I think that what I saw isn't what I want in a 3D experience.

Yet...

The Nintendo 3DS, NVIDEA 3D and general thoughts on 3D


I'd like to take this opportunity to simultaneously thank and curse James Cameron. Were it not for his wildly successful 3D movie, 2009's Pocahontas in Space, this current saturation of 3D in tv, movies, and video games would most likely not have happened. Sure, the overall quality movie was debatable, but the 3D was well done, and is a great benchmark for what 3D can and should be with the technology we have available to us.

Fast forward two years. 3D is not a benchmark technology anymore, despite recent tech advances. Instead, it appears to be a fad that every technology company is struggling to get in bed with. Unfortunately, the numbers argue that 3D enabled devices (mostly televisions) sold very poorly in 2010, and the promise of better (read: glasses free) technology is expensive and still a ways off. If you have not invested in 3D tech yet, nothing at PAX East 2011 would suggest you need to run out and spend your hard-earned simoleons on this stuff.

That little contraption is a base station needed for those glasses to even work at all 

That's not to say that 3D isn't an interesting tech though. The two great demos I got to see at PAX highlighted the PC gaming front and Nintendo's upcoming bombshell of a device. NVIDEA's 3D vision tech looks very well done on the PC gaming scene. The demo I had a change to see was of the PC version of Crysis 2, and (for the most part) it looked pretty good. The 3D seemed limited to your HUD and foreground animations. Things like the weapon you were carrying, melee attacks, reload animations, and menu displays were all rendered in really great looking 3D, while the backgrounds and things off in the distance rendered like games have done for decades. The 3D came off as a tough thing to do for every aspect of the game's environment, but what was vaulted out of the screen was very good looking.

Sadly, you needed glasses. Yeah, glasses are the one thing really holding back great 3D entertainment. They are expensive and some even need base stations. Thats a drag for communal enjoyment of 3D. Thankfully, most PC gamers don't play with multiple people in the room, so in NVIDEA's case, they may be on to something here. Of course, your display has to support it, your game has to support it, and it destroys your HD resolution because it has to split the image. (A quick and not-so-scientific example: a HD-720p image would need be split into two Non-HD-360p images in order for the 3D effect to work, and for better 3D, even more image divisions would need to occur).

The Nintendo 3DS - Now with more sliders

At first, the Nintendo 3DS excited me. Then, amidst walking the show floor and realizing I may not get to demo it because of long lines, I ended up peeking over someone's shoulder for awhile watching the thing in action. After about ten minutes of this, the 3DS seemed like something I'll be ignoring.

Then, on the final day of the show, I found a demo station tucked away in the corner with virtually no line, so I played it again, and now I'm excited about it once more. The thing that really impressed me was the device itself, though. The 3D was interesting but in no way was mind blowing like Nintendo may push in their unavoidable press releases this month. The hardware was solid, the new control nub was decent, and the screens were bright and beautiful. I really liked the new start/select/home buttons on the bottom, and when I secretly exited the game demo for the handheld's OS, I was impressed to see that it was more than just a game loader, but it was more akin to the complexity of the Wii's channel chooser. This system was built for your game lifestyle, not just the carts in your pocket. I like that.


"Tell us more about the 3D!" I can hear the children screaming. I found the technique they used to project 3D very interesting. As most who understand the term could have guessed, the top screen on the 3DS utilizes a "depth of field" technology, which is simply layered screens with various things being projected on them at once. The more you adjusted the slider, the more the image was divided among the layered screens amidst some transparency on the higher layers. To the REALLY educated reader, they would recognize this as the "Parallax Barrier." The slider that adjusts the 3D basically manipulates this and coupled with traditional red/blue projection, the 3D effect is achieved without glasses.

It is a cool looking thing, but hardly anything necessary. To me, the 3D just adds to a list of already great upgrades to the existing DS, and the package overall is solid for a sequel to Nintendo's most successful system to date.

The price point could be better though. $250? Seems a bit much to me, but every time someone discusses price of new tech, the same thing is always said by just about everyone: "It will still be cheaper than Sony."

Sony: Jackasses in 3D

So thank you, James Cameron, for all of that.
Check back later for more PAX recovery postings.

~ Jimmy "They used to hand out 3D glasses in cereal boxes." the G.

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This post has a Shenanaganary rating of:

"One of Biff's goons in Back to the Future wore 3D glasses in 1955. If we really haven't progressed that far from this level of technology in 60 years, I fail to see why we should pay attention now."