Sony has stolen some of the CES spotlight with its stereo-3D game demos.
The science of stereoscoping is most recognizable to people from places like IMAX theatres, where viewers don those cheap wooden or plastic red-and-blue goggles to visualize Beowulf flowing through the theater’s three-dimensional space, not just 3D images on a 2D screen.
Sony is testing these technologies with its Playstation 3 titles Gran Turismo and Motorstorm: Pacific Rift, which were displayed at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in an entirely new level of gaming realism.
Attendees at Sony’s CES presentation were welcomed with a pair of RealID 3D glasses at their seats and Sony Chairman Howard Stringer standing in front of a series of large television screens. He noted to the crowd before unleashing them to view the games in living action, “These are very special glasses. They’re a prototype of what we’re developing in our labs.”
There exists a multitude of stereoscope technologies in development by various research institutions and by Sony’s own internal scientists. All these options have the conglomerate hesitant to invest in mass manufacturing of 3D-enabled games.
“There are so many different technologies that are capable of bringing 3D to the home,” commented Sony product manager John Wyckoff to GameCyte. “We’re being very careful about evaluating as many as we can to see which ones make sense.”
Sony is the second game company in recent times to come public with its 3D projects; Blitz Games announced it was developing titles for both the PS3 and Xbox 360 that allowed “for games to run in both 2D and 3D in one version – by simply flicking a ‘switch’ between them.”
