Sony's 3D Dream: One Year On

No. I mean obviously we’re Sony Computer Entertainment, so obviously we work closely with the electronics division but it would be rude of us to ask, and even ruder for us to say if we did have those numbers. It’s really down to them to say that.

I think it’s the case that if everything anyone watched in 3D was totally awesome, then penetration of the market would be far quicker with 3D TVs, because people like my wife might be saying to me “I want a 3D TV because I want to watch that movie,” because she’s not a gamer, and that helps me justify the 3D TV. But I don’t think it’s really such a big issue for games. At the end of the day games are interactive, other things like movies, TV, are more passive, but I think we’re a very different industry really, very different medium.

Now we've got a good reliable quality bar we can start challenging people to push it further in the creative domain.

Going back to your question about whether it’ll fizzle out based on display uptake, I think it’ll go the opposite. I think it’s actually going to accelerate a lot quicker when more people start experiencing the benefits for themselves.

And it goes back to when you look at being 12 months in with 3D gaming and saying yes, we’ve got lots of high quality games out there already, a lot of our big hitter games that people waited eagerly for, out there and then in 3D, but this is just the beginning. As people do learn we’re going to see things really change.

The presentation we did later on today was all about art as a creative medium. We’ve really focused a lot on making sure we get high quality, technically correct 3D so when people do add 3D to games it’s done well and already just adding 3D makes a hell of a difference, a real wow factor. But what we’re seeing now is we can start exploiting that. Now we’ve got a good reliable quality bar we can start challenging people to push it further in the creative domain.

What we’re going to start seeing is really new, different experiences. To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, take a game like Resistance 3. So you’ve got these aliens attacking and one runs up towards you and maybe attacks your character. Imagine this in 3D and the way you could take this. Understanding the environment of the 3D allows you to do different things, so imagine if the edges of the screen were left with a black border top and bottom or something. So we can deliberately use that creatively and when an alien attacks you maybe his fingers come over that border. Now when you’re looking at your TV, you wouldn’t think that was a little black border that’s rendered in the game, you’d be thinking that is the edge of your TV and suddenly some alien’s hands have just come into your room.

Not really. That’s where we’ve been doing for the last 12 months and because of the results we’ve already seen - so we have definitely been carrying that message to this point - but today was a bit of a change in direction for us. So until this point we’ve been saying “this is how you do it, this is how you do it well, we’re here to support you, it doesn’t necessarily cost a lot” because actually that was one of the big fears at the beginning from the development teams, was cost. Because obviously when you read about 3D and movies and live broadcasts that’s what they have, but for us it’s not the case.

So we were very keen to be open about our performance and get our internal teams, any teams that would be willing to allow us access to their statistics to be able to make it clear to people that this doesn’t cost a lot, there’s lot of ways of doing this, being as open as we possibly can with it.

But that was kind of the first year. We’ll still do that no doubt, but what we’re here for now is a change to this. We’re basically saying because of the volume, we’ve seen a lot of games doing this well know, we’ll still support new people coming along, we’ll still support existing people with the basic technical side, but what we’re really doing now is challenging the creative side. Right, we’ve got a good, solid, technical base now, because typically we’ve done a lot of our presentations to programming tracks, making sure the render programmers are very familiar with the technology. Now what we want to do is challenge the artists and the creatives and the designers and say "think about what you could do with this. How you can exploit this and make something amazing, something that’s never before been experienced?"

If we'd have gone too early on the creative side what we might have had is a little bit like when people first saw the early 1950's 3D movies.

Obviously in our industry this is just music to their ears, they just love this kind of thing. They’re just going to embrace this and they’re going to start really pushing this now. But we’re also confident because the technical side of it is well understood, and we’re still there to support that as well. So if someone puts a creative challenge too far, there’s a good buffer in place to make sure it still remains high quality, comfortable, all the rest of it

I think if we’d have gone too early on the creative side what we might have had is a little bit like when people first saw the early 1950’s 3D movies, where everyone just threw things out of the screen and it was all so in your face. And that’s not where we wanted to start from, we wanted to start with technical correctness, because we know that just looking at good quality 3D is a fantastic wow experience moment. Let’s start from there, let’s add the creative thing when we know that that’s safe and all moving nicely.

So I think opposite to the movies, if you think about the 3D cinema launch with Avatar, the big champagne cork effect, the best first, I think we’re probably going to be the other way round where we’ll build to that. And when effectively the Avatar of 3D games comes out, not only have you got a good reason to buy it, but there’s a whole host of other good content there as well. So it’s not that you’ll invest in a display and only have one game to play, you know you’ve got a catalogue of very good games to play in addition to that.