DescentBB

So most Tech guys know how 3D TV's work. Wearing glasses that are in sync with the TV, each eye has a shutter that closes while the other is open, and the screen shifts slightly for each eye, and your brain puts the two images together...

A friend of mine were talking, and came up with this idea...

Lets say your playing Halo, or a Racing Game, or Madden.. You play the game using 3D glasses, except the both eyes shutter at the same time, but while yours are closed, your friends are open, and the TV shows THEIR point of view. Then his shuts, yours open, and the screen shows your point of view. To anyone else w/o glasses it would have a Ghost effect where they see two things on the screen at once.

But to those wearing glasses, you see just your screen, they see just theirs. So you can both play a racing or FPS game w/o having a split screen. Or play Madden and the other guy has NO CLUE what play you just selected.

On 240hz TV's you could even go 4 players...

Seems like the technology is there, just a matter of programming the game, and Glasses.
Only question i would have is are current consoles able to push Full Screen 1080p graphics to 4 "Screens" at once.

Thoughts?

Regarding the ability to render fullscreen for multiple players: Consoles are rarely rendering full 1080p. They're typically rendering at 720p (or less if the demand is heavy), and just upscaling. So it's really a question of how much quality you can get with multiple players.

I believe it's a god idea, though I'd think it might be limited by the pixel response time of the television. For TVs with slower response time, the previous frame (for the other player) may not be completely gone by the time your frame comes up.

This is true.

So your saying we came up with a viable idea in which the technology to push it is not really there yet?

Thats awesome! lol

Crossover would be a factor (polarized glasses always let a little bit of light slip through) and the pixel response time is also an issue leading to further ghosting. But the main problem would be getting the console to deliver the constant 120 FPS needed to pull it off, developers wanting to do this would have to considerably lower the graphical demands to deliver 60 frames to each player. More likely the devs would just reduce it to 30 frames for each player, which would also give more time for the pixels to switch, helping to reduce ghosting.

240 FPS at 1080p would be impossible currently because there isn't enough bandwidth (and likely never will be) in HDMI to transport that much video data. With the overhead you're talking nearly 20 gigabits/sec (roughly 2 gigabytes per second) just for the video when HDMI video maxes out at 8 gigabits. The TVs that claim to operate at 240 Hz are all just faking it by interpolating frames.

It is possible just barely with Displayport, which has more video bandwidth (17 gbps) and less overhead than HDMI. Although the intended use in Displayport was to drive four separate 1920x1080/60p displays at once, but the effect is the same.

A desktop video card with HDMI out might be able to do it, on the other hand. Consoles are just using 5-6 year old technology.

That's a really cool idea. Current gen hardware way not be able to quite handle it, but I bet next gen will.

Krom wrote:240 FPS at 1080p would be impossible currently because there isn't enough bandwidth (and likely never will be) in HDMI to transport that much video data. With the overhead you're talking nearly 20 gigabits/sec (roughly 2 gigabytes per second) just for the video when HDMI video maxes out at 8 gigabits. The TVs that claim to operate at 240 Hz are all just faking it by interpolating frames.

What if they used paralleled HDMI lines? It would require the TV's to up their technology, but I'd imagine it being doable. The TV would probably have to have two (or three or four) independent chipsets, with really only the screen being shared between the two... then all you need is a clock/technology to toggle screen control between the different drivers at a high rate. Likewise, the consoles would have to develop the technology to parallel their video output to multiple ports.

I think it's a cool idea.

In the long run, developing games/consoles that leverage 3D imaging like movies are doing would probably be more successful... if you want to play each other, bring over an extra TV and console and network them.

I while before 3D tv's came out (at least anywhere near mainstream), I remember reading about a layered tv. It basically had several "plains" of transparent tv's, to give the sense of depth (each plain projected it's own image). I wonder if you could have a TV within a TV. Probably not practical...

</brainstorm off>

*insert "yo dawg" here*

Okay so nevermind - was in a local GameStop and saw a "Coming Soon" poster.

Sony has a product called SimulView coming out.. It does this exact thing.

http://3dvision-blog.com/new-informatio ... cech-zed1/