All About 3D - Part Two

To be perfectly honest, it's actually worse. There are lots of fights about the standards, there are so many ways of doing it. In some ways I feel good about the fact that whether it be a DLP, a plasma, an LED, an OLED... they've all got ways to be 3D - but they're different and give you slightly different experiences.

But they can build it in on all of those technologies - it would be a bugger if you could only do 3D on plasmas, when they're going a bit out of fashion...

The hardware gives you a slightly different experience on things like the brightness of the picture, there are some things to do with ghosting and things like that - so you have to be aware of that, but then each TV manufacturer has different ways they believe is best to send a 3D picture through to the TV.

The fact is, you have to send a left and right picture through, so how do you do that? Well, you could just alternate the frames - one for each side - but if you do that on a normal console or DVD player, they all run at 60Hz (although PAL is 50Hz). That means you're flicking each image at 30 frames per second and 3D doesn't work very well at that speed - the illusion starts to break down a little bit.

So they had to get a left and right frame at 60 frames per second. Some people in the projector world have just upgraded the equipment to supply left and right alternating images at 120Hz - which is great. So you can get projectors out there that will run 3D movies, via PCs with hardware cards, that can do 120Hz. They've minimalised the market, and frankly your Blu-rays, Xbox 360s and PlayStation 3s run at 60Hz... so currently we can't run on those projectors.

Having said that, I've talked to a couple of manufacturers and they're looking at this, because they've seen a pretty big market for being able to do 3D via console, particularly since they can run movies. They realise maybe they shouldn't have gone down that route. So that's one mistake that's been made.

So then - if you've got to do left and right images at 60Hz, how do you interleave it? You could split the screen into left and right halves, or you could interlace it every other line... there are about six different methods, and TV manufacturers have come down on different ones which is a bit of a pain. It means we have to write a software driver underneath the hood to convert it to the different formats.

Apart from being a pain (because you have to buy the different TVs and make sure they all work and spend a few days on each one) it's one extra process. We're talking 1080p resolution, so you have to shuffle that amount of memory just before you're about to put it through the TV - it's one last pass across a very large lump of memory, which we could have done without.

The problem is, they've already been selling the TVs, and there are already TVs out there that we want to support. In America they've sold over 2 million 3DTVs - they are selling, and you can buy them here if you know what you're looking for. And they're different formats.

The one thing we're conscious of is that we're going out with a game and the last thing we want people to do is not feel burned by buying our game, and finding it doesn't work. We've gone to great lengths to make sure we support everything, and we've proven we can do it - but I feel that's exactly what everyone else is going to have to do.

So when they work out the format for playing movies... we'd like to be able to just put it out on a format that covers 80 per cent of the market, but then you'll have 20 per cent of people who bought expensive TVs only to find the game doesn't work. That will cause backlash.