By Jim Rossignol on January 10th, 2008 at 5:13 pm.
This user-submitted video over on Game Trailers is somewhat clumsily entitled “True 3D Future Gaming”, and immediately raises the topic of whether holographic projection systems will ever feature in our gaming lives. I’ve been seeing this kind of stuff turn up at the prototype stage for a few years now, and they always make me think of the 3D adverts you seen in science fiction, but never of gaming. I’d suggest that these things might one day make impressive static displays and holo-billboards, but might never be any use for interactive media. We’re much more likely to make use of smaller, thinner flat screens.
You’ll always be three-dimensional to us, Game Trailers.
Thoughts?
10/01/2008 at 17:28 roryok says:
Yeah but can I play doom on it?
=P
10/01/2008 at 17:52 Lu-Tze says:
A lot of that looks very 2D, especially the footage of people. I think it’s the kind of thing you need to see in person to appreciate, and things rotating quickly somewhat destroys the illusion of depth because you don’t get a real sense of what it’s like to walk around the object.
10/01/2008 at 17:59 dartt says:
Yeah, it’s hard to appreciate a 3d demonstration through a 2d display.
This guy’s head tracking tech using a wii remote is pretty impressive.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw
It gives the illusion of depth by making the 2d screen seem like a window.
10/01/2008 at 18:07 Yhancik says:
It looks to work decently for isolated objects to be seen from multiple angles, but I don’t see how well it would work with things in a context. Like 99% of games.
Oh but I might be wrong.
It would definitely work for holo-strip, nonetheless.
10/01/2008 at 18:13 Kast says:
Depth will be a major issue and so far we’ve only seen objects in isolation. What about vistas and rooms?
Also I imagine that live action footage can only be taken in special blue screen sets – it’d be VERY difficult to record objects or events in open areas.
10/01/2008 at 18:20 DuBBle says:
How does it work? I’m amazed that an image can be projected into ‘thin air’!
10/01/2008 at 18:24 noggin says:
wow, I can’t get enough of those pyramids… and then I caught a glimpse of a man passing a ball to a zebra!
True 3D Future Zebra Football
10/01/2008 at 18:39 Junior says:
I can’t see why there aren’t more stereoscopic mods for games, like the one there was for quake 3 that I can’t find or remember the name of…
Cool mod though, I spent a couple of hours on empty maps looking at all the scenery.
10/01/2008 at 18:49 Sam says:
@DuBBle: it’s not projecting into “thin air” at all. Although you can’t see it very well in the video, the inverted pyramid is actually a physical object, the images being formed from some clever optics and four projectors (presumably mounted to project through each face?). The system is called Cheoptics 360, in a rather cheesy attempt to reference the essentially pyramidal nature of the thing.
It is not, as others have mentioned, clear if this system is any good at displaying complex, multi-depthed 3d images. I suspect it may have problems, personally.
10/01/2008 at 19:05 terry says:
How could it go wrong?
10/01/2008 at 19:29 Meat Circus says:
@dartt:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw]
That head-tracking thing is brilliant! And, it works with the technology we have now, and needs no special screens.
Why did nobody think of it before?
Dear Sonintendosoft, you need to steal^H^H^H^H^Hembrace this man’s ideas immediately.
The reason we won’t see full-colour, full-paralax computer generated holography within, say, twenty years is because of the enormous quantities of data that’s needed to generate a CGH image.
We’re talking GPUs that would need to be able to process a couple of terabytes of interferometry data per second to make a small image. I know this because I did some work on CGH at Uni.
Not gonna happen any time soon, guys and gals.
10/01/2008 at 19:31 Meat Circus says:
@terry:
Zomg! I remember that monstrosity from Butlins when I was a kiddy. I thought its existence was a false memory implanted so I wouldn’t realise I was a replicant.
10/01/2008 at 19:37 yns88 says:
WHERE ARE MY HOLOGRAMS. I THOUGHT THIS WAS THE FUTURE.
I’m leaving, and I’m taking my robot dog with me >:|
10/01/2008 at 20:28 Janek says:
ROBOPUPPY COMMENCING DEPARTURE. DEPARTURE IN PROGRESS.
10/01/2008 at 22:56 NegativeZero says:
I don’t think this will ever be very useful for gaming. It seems reasonably limited too.
More likely we’ll see a rise in Augmented Reality stuff – essentially where you’d wear a headset with goggles and wander around an area and a computer in the headset would keep track of where you are, what you’re looking at and what you’re doing and interpolate computer-generated imagery into what you’re seeing directly.
10/01/2008 at 22:59 WCAYPAHWAT says:
My jetpack and hovercraft are now eight years overdue. Whatever happened to the great promise that was the year 2000 AD?
10/01/2008 at 23:02 roryok says:
“WHERE ARE MY HOLOGRAMS. I THOUGHT THIS WAS THE FUTURE.”
You idiot! The future isn’t happening till later on. Get with the times.
10/01/2008 at 23:06 WCAYPAHWAT says:
hover*car* damnit.
10/01/2008 at 23:07 derFeef says:
Uhm, well, there was a whole fashion show with holograms, I think it was diesel and it was very impressive. This thing is only meh…
10/01/2008 at 23:31 Schadenfreude says:
The future doesn’t happening until Sony say so. Didn’t you get the memo?
11/01/2008 at 00:27 Andrew Mayer says:
There will be 3D games when there are good 3D displays. It’s kind of silly to think that it will never happen.
11/01/2008 at 01:07 Leelad says:
You can see it in full 360 degree angle..WITH HUGE SHITTING GIRDERS IN THE WAY!!
11/01/2008 at 01:27 DigitalSignalX says:
clearly we need the porn industry to pave the way for this technology to become cheaply accessible in the home and office. *waits patiently*
11/01/2008 at 08:32 Duncan says:
As mentioned above, Johnny Chung Lee’s homebrew head-tracking using the wii remote and sensor bar (or just a pair of IR LEDs mounted on some glasses) is *very* cool.
You can download it and it’s easy to setup and get running – we’ve had it going in the office and had a dozen people looking like tits while holding a Wii sensor bar over their heads and ducking around a screen going “oooh looky”. The effect works beautifully and as it just moves the in-game camera around, would easily work with *any* 3D game.
If you’ve got a bluetooth dongle for your PC, a Wii remote and Wii sensor bar, I’d highly recommend giving it a go as it’s pretty cool :-)
11/01/2008 at 08:42 Thiefsie says:
This looks positively stupid, and they haven’t shown that it works at all or explained it. They need a still object and for the camera to just move about it, everything moving negates the effect and literally it may as well be a flat screen. Things like the footage of the girls dancing and the car on the road are obviously 2D…?? so… really… apar from the fact its in a massive encasement of steel and it doesn’t look that high fidelity…
The wii hack which I imagine is quite similar to TrackIR is leaps and bounds better than this, cheaper and much more useful.
11/01/2008 at 10:37 Darune says:
The question is: Do we want to surround a 3D world ?
Because this holographic projection makes you surround 3D objects, you will have to walk around the object to see its different faces.
In video game we are looking for immersion, what is more natural than turning you head in the direction you want to look ?
I remembered, when i was a child, there were Virtual Reality arcade system which were looking like this: http://www.stereo3d.com/img/su2000_vrarcade.gif i still don’t understand why these systems disappeared, however thanks to johny lee we can now do that at home ;)
I believe holographic projection is not the future of video gaming but i hope that VR/head tracking systems will soon be integrated in games.
12/01/2008 at 04:26 Anthony Damiani says:
What, you think it’ll NEVER be done?
Never?
15/01/2008 at 00:07 Skylance says:
@derFeef
Those weren’t holograms. They had two sheets of very thin, very clear (not so clear you can’t see it) plastic on either side of the runway that they projected the images on. Don’t get me wrong, it was very, very clever bit of imaging trickery. That said said, they were by no means holographic images.
Look closer at the videos, you’ll see what I mean.