It was definitely useful and appreciated on the "New" Nintendo 3DS XL, which also used a camera to track your eye movements and adjust the divergence accordingly. I hate the fact that Nintendo abandoned this technology because experiencing Ocarina of Time and Star Fox 64 in 3D was world-changing to me.
I'd say I'm not the only one who misses this technology in games, because a used New 3DS XL costs at least $200 on eBay right now, which is more than what I paid new.
I always thought 3D would combine really nicely with a ray traced graphics full of bright colors and reflections, similar to all those ray tracing demos with dozens of glossy marbles.
The 3DS is different, it's using a lenticular screen so your eyes actually see different images! The eye tracking allows it to work even if the position of your eyes changes (ie because you moved your head).
Presumably developers could have combined this with parallax head tracking for an even stronger effect when you move your head (or the console), but as far as I know no one did.
Do you mean combining the eye tracking with using a lenticular screen? What would do you think the use cases would/could be?
Well, there are two different ways (among others) that your brain detects depth:
1. Each eye sees the object from a different angle.
2. Both eyes see the object from a different angle when the object is moved relative to your head.
The 3DS does only #1. TFA does only #2. Presumably if you did both, you could get a much stronger effect.
I think the New 3DS had the hardware to do both in theory, but it probably would have made development and backwards compatibility overly complicated!
Yeah Nintendo 3DS XL was awesome, but even then, you'd have to use that one specific console in order to be able to play that game.
What we're thinking is to enable this technology - as long as there is a camera and a screen - instantly accessible across billions of devices.
That means that the 3D effect would be applicable not only for games built for that specific console - but for any and all games that are already in a 3D environment.
The technology is still alive and well in some genres, particularly flight sims. One common free solution is to run OpenTrack with the included neural net webcam tracker, which plugs into TrackIR-enabled apps and works like a charm.
Samsung recently released a monitor with similar technology, I believe, as a FYI.
I'm surprised there's still a market for non-VR consumer 3D! I remember the post-Avatar rush of 3D-related products that never quite panned out.
I remember the 3D glasses that you could plug into the Sega Master System in the mid-80s. They took what would be interlaced frames and rendered them to different eyes instead (which made the version getting shown on the connected TV pretty trippy too).
And then there was the time travel arcade game (also by Sega) that used a kind of Pepper's Ghost effect to give the appearance of 3D without glasses. That was in the early 90s.
I think the idea of 3D displays keeps resurfacing because there's always a chance that the tech has caught up to people's dreams, and VR displays sure have brought the latency down a lot but even the lightest headsets are still pretty uncomfortable after extended use. Maybe in another few generations... but it will still feel limiting until we have holodeck-style environments IMO.
I wasn't aware of all of those, will check them out - thanks for sharing!
Yes I believe you are right in that the tech is catching up with concepts that seemed futuristic in the past. For example the hardware today supports much more than it would have been able to do, say, 5-10 years ago.
Our hypothesis is that the current solutions out there still require the consumer to buy something, wear something, install something etc. - while we want to build something that becomes instantly accessible across billions of devices without any friction for the actual consumer.
Vr has taken over this market. Get a vr headset you won't be disappointed.
Other than DCS, Skyrim, and that one Star Wars game at Dave and Buster's where you duel Darth Vader, I don't see a lot that sings to me just yet. Granted, I could easily get 2,000 hours out of DCS over the span of a decade just flying every third and fourth generation fighter jet ever made.
Maybe VR doesn't need that many games because the small handful of good ones have so much depth and replay value. I guess I just talked myself into a $700 VR kit and possibly a $700 GPU upgrade, depending on whether or not my RTX 3060 is up to task.
Not sure what vr kit you're looking at, but if it's a 4k headset to push at 90fps you'll want something more like a 3080 or 4070. But if it's lower resolution it won't need quite so much power.
Has it though? And what "market" are you referring to here?
Fully agreed that if you want 100% full 6DOF immersion - go and pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars to wear a heavy and cumbersome headset on your head. We're not disputing that or thinking of competing with that.
What we're saying is that there may be a much larger market consisting of people who are not ready to commit to pay so much money to wear something that will give them motion sickness after 10 minutes.
If you're developing a VR game your market consists of 50 million people around the world who owns a VR headset. That's great. But since you already built the VR world in 3D, you could also open up the market to billions of people who want to play your game but on their own devices.
Admittedly, it won't be the same experience, but it could be a "midpoint". Not everyone can afford and is willing to pay for a VR headset.