Tech Interview: PlayStation 3D

We don't know. According to the website they're battery-powered. This one's connected via infrared. These are standard VizSim glasses. In the dim and distant past we would've used something very similar to this at British Aerospace, but we don't know about the consumer items. There are loads of technical details on the Sony Style US website.

That's the interesting thing with the Sony solution because we're supporting the HDMI 1.4 3D set, which takes all that complexity away. We're not expecting users to know how to configure pages and pages of 3D settings. You'll select 3D, and that'll be it.

HDMI 1.4 on the 3D side of things... you have a 720p60, 720p50 and also a 1080p24 standard I think. So we've got all of those to call on basically.

Exactly. There may be other things it can do beyond that, but certainly those specs are accurate.

Yes, but you have to be a little bit careful about this. The first thing to say is that when you saw our games, you didn't see a big set-up screen and that is the aim. That you won't have to go through millions of different settings with the core PS3 games. We want to make it as straightforward as possible for people and in truth it isn't really rocket science to make it look comfortable on people's screens.

But it is true that screen size can be important. The 3D settings that we are using at the moment are optimal for a wide range of normal TVs but obviously the aim is that we're not doing our job properly if it won't produce a stunning 3D experience on everyone's screens.

This is our internal R&D system, yeah.

We certainly work closely with them on these sorts of points. A lot of the work to date has been on retrofitting existing games, taking a big game and adding 3D visualisation. You can't go back to the base render pipeline and do all the best possible optimisations. Sometimes they're almost done on a sledgehammer-type basis. We're lucky that PS3 has so much power that this has been possible.

The future holds a lot more possibilities, particularly if you built the engine from the ground up to support 3D. You might even put other things in there and get more out of the 3D effect. I think it's Pixar that quote that for their animated movies it's a one-third overhead for rendering their stereoscopic 3D.

You'd have to have a look at their notes on render numbers. In the movie industry there's a lot of optimisation that's done on their render pipeline. In fact, they're slightly more mature than we are in terms of their 3D. If you think about it, the 3D movies such as Beowulf are relatively old now. Of course, the naive approach is to render the image twice and that gives you a quick result.

Yes, exactly.

Ironic but yes, the video does look a bit "steppy". It's rendering very mildly compressed video streams off the PS3's disc which is why it's "steppier" than you'd like. The final Blu-ray video solutions won't be like that, they'll be silky smooth.

If you play the movie several times you'll notice that the stepping is in different places. It's the decoder basically. It was put together so we could use it at shows and stuff like that. We'll put it in the bin eventually.

Yes, it'll never be seen by consumers.

Yes that's right, so we look after the PS3 bit...

In Housemarque's case it's full 720p per eye at 60Hz.

That's one for our Japanese colleagues!

We're just working within the confines of the SDK that's supplied to us.