One of 3D gaming’s biggest advocates has been Mick Hocking, senior group director of Sony Computer Entertainment’s Worldwide Studios 3D team. The founder of Evolution Studios, which is now part of Sony, supervises the development of 3D games, including development of PlayStation’s auto racing brands and the anticipated “Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception.” Speakeasy caught up with Hocking about ways that 3D can actually improve the gaming experience.
What will make today’s 3D more enduring than the red and blue movie 3D that we’ve seen regularly reappear over the past 50 years?
I think the crucial thing we’re seeing this time, unlike in the 80s or even back in the 50s, is a convergence of technology. What we’ve seen in convergence of display technologies and processing power coming to the point now where we can offer very high quality HD 3D experiences to gaming fans for a very reasonable cost. A cost that all consumers can buy into. In terms of technology, that’s why it’s appeared again.
Why has 3D failed to stick in the past?
It was popular, but then it failed because people just did not get good quality 3D experiences. And, of course, they vote with their feet and then walk away. 3D was always a compromise before. You could either have fairly high quality but at huge cost or you could have a lower more reasonable cost but you couldn’t have any quality in terms of the display and latency of drawing images in 3D.
How are all of these new 3D initiatives creating more context for non-gamers?
Even in 12 months, we’ve moving on very rapidly from the first 3D TVs to things like the PlayStation Monitor. At CES [Consumer Electronics Show] this year, we saw a whole proliferation of 3D devices that came on the market. Things like 3D cameras, camcorders, Bloggies, tablets, laptops and mobile phones. A lot of these things allow people to create their own 3D content. People will then want to enjoy that content on large screen 3D TVs and, therefore, go out and buy a upgrade to a new 3D TV.
You’ve worked on military flight simulators where depth of field is important for realistic training. How have you applied that technology to enhance game playability?
It’s only when you get right close to the ground with bombing runs or helicopters where 3D becomes really critical. It’s even more important for racing simulators. When you put it into 3D, you then have to reproduce 3D very accurately so the racing driver believes that they are about 50 meters from a corner, and they’ll brake in the exactly same position. And if the physics model has the same performance parameters, they will get the exact same lap time in the real world.
Do people actually play better in 3D environments versus 2D?
It doesn’t make them a better games player, but if you can see something more clearly and understand something more naturally, whether it’s speed distance or scale, you can respond better to that. So we’ve found that people do get better scores in 3D.
What are some other examples where 3D would trump 2D?
Of course, every game is different. With a simple game like “Tumble” the tower building game. We can use 3D just to help the person to perceive the exact point in space where they’re going to place the block. In 2D, we’d use shadows so you can see where the block is going to fall. So you can pick up the block with the ‘Move’ controller and it becomes obvious where you’d put the block to build the tower.
How is a game with native 3D better, if at all, to a game that’s just had 3D added on afterwards?
There is a difference. If you render 3D from the outset, your whole rendering engine can support 3D. It will be pixel perfect in terms of the depth it can produce. But you can have 3D afterwards and have just as high of a quality result. The issue is that it has to be done technically correctly. We have 10 technical checks that all 3D games should adhere to. These also apply to films and TV.
What’s one technical example that viewers might notice in poorly executed 3D?
There are a number of subtle things. You have to avoid rapid changes in parallax—the depth in the scene—because your eyes take a little time to perceive what you’re looking at. So don’t use rapid camera transitions between areas of different depth. Things like the crosshairs in first-person shooters. That has to be done so that it sits in the correct position of space so the gun is always pointing at the crosshair and the crosshairs are always sitting in the correct depth of the scene.
Teams that rush the 3D implementation may miss these items, the games get launched and the people don’t end up enjoying the 3D experience. They may not be able to tell you why its wrong but they’re getting tired and not enjoying it.
Is poor developer implementation why some people get headaches from 3D?
Yeah, you don’t get eyestrain or headaches if 3D is implemented correctly. Those are symptoms of the software or hardware not creating the 3D technically correctly.
Any lessons that you’ve learned along the way?
In the game “Killzone,” when doing the sniper view, I’ve got my eye right next to the gunsite. Now, when we first implemented that, the gunsite was in focus. What’s true in 3D is that anything that’s in focus that’s closest to you, you’ll look at. That’s just how we evolved to look at things. We found that players were looking at the actual metal surround of the gunsite and not through the lens at the target. So we had to blur the gunsite to simulate the depth of field you’d normally get when looking through a gunsite. Those kinds of things all have to be understood and done correctly.
Source:http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2011/09/21/sony%E2%80%99s-mick-hocking-on-why-3d-is-here-to-stay/
