Some thoughts on 3D

A recent post by Sandy Carter on her blog about the Avatar movie and 3D effects got me thinking a little about 3D. Right now there’s a lot of buzz about 3D and I will admit that it’s pretty cool, or at least the Avatar movie was although I’m not sure if the success of the movie is a result of the use of 3D, the quality of the graphics or maybe a bit of both.

Anyway, one thing that has occurred to me is that what these 3D effects give us is really only enhanced depth perception. Whilst that is great, we still only have a single point of view of the image. IE, that of the camera. We can no more move around this so called 3D image than we can with a regular flat image, be it screen, paper or whatever.

OK, now lets looks at virtual worlds. These give us the ability to move around in a three dimensional world but we interact with it through a two dimensional medium (I bet you can see where I am going with this can’t you?).

So what would happen if we could merge the two. Three dimensional virtual worlds with true 3d depth perception. That would be pretty cool, Imagine playing say Halo in 3D.

But, let’s not stop there. Right now there’s a lot of interest in augmented reality (AR) where digital imagery is overlaid over a real world video view to provide an enhanced experience as show in this demo of the London Underground. So what would happen if instead of using a separate 2D device like the iphone, you were to use 3D depth perception technology (the geeky glasses) to overlay AR data onto the real world. Consider for instance gaming. Instead of being locked to the computer or HD TV, you could actually play say Halo or Modern Warfare or any number of first person games in the real world with the other payers and computer generated imagery being overlayed, in 3 dimensions onto your real world. Instead of sitting in front of a TV or computer all day, kids might actually go out and play. Imagine the health benefits alone from that.