OK – so last night I got a chance to play around a bit with the Alienware OptX^TM AW2310 3D moniter, (snappy name) courtesy of Dell UK. 3D is something that seems to be dividing the entertainment industry – Sky are placing some pretty heavy bets on it’s success, and after the flood of 3D televisions being shown at CES, it’s clear that whether we like it or not, it’s going to be forced down our throats over the next few years.

The monitor I was allowed to play with was very impressive indeed. 3D is hard to talk about because it is in essence such a visual experience, but the best I can do is to describe the experience as much deeper than I imagined. Today’s fancy-schmancy 3D doesn’t concern itself with popping out the screen, like some horrible fairground ride from 1995, but rather it extends the image inwards. Nothing appeared to fly at my face, but my vehicle (I was playing a racing game) genuinely felt like it was closer to me than the car just in front.

There were a few graphical hiccups – I noticed some shadows under the cars were appearing in the wrong ‘depth’ (seriously, someone’s going to have to coin some jargon for critiquing 3D) and thus became floating black rectangles, but other than that, I was seriously impressed.

So – can it be made successful?

Yes. If it is no extra hassle to developers to make a game with 3D capabilities.

As an analogy, consider the waning third-party support for the Wii. Nintendo’s console has the biggest market-share, so why are developers so reluctant to port the big titles hitting the 360 and PS3 to the Wii? My theory – it’s too much hassle. Developing for an HD console with a joypad controller, and then reworking the game for an SD console with a totally unique control system is probably going to create a longer development cycle than most teams can afford.

If I understand correctly (and if anyone knows more about this I’d really like to hear from you) implementing 3D in a videogame isn’t too arduous. I’ve been told it’s a fairly simple on-the-fly graphics processing affair. In other words, you can make your game, and whack in some 3D compatibility for anyone at home who happens to have the right blend of hardware. If it doesn’t force developers to focus exclusively on 3D or non-3D – if it’s simply a matter of deciding, as a gamer, whether you want to invest in the other hardware, graphics cards and other stuff necessary, then it could really work.

Thoughts?

p.s. How hardcore are we, posting some PC gaming discussion on official ‘iPad analysis’ day?

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