Alex Watson
The red-and-blue glasses are long gone and 3D tech is on the rise; but one company more than all the others has learned the lessons of the past.
I’ve been to Tokyo several times and I always make time to visit Akihabara, the area of the Japanese capital devoted to the geekiest of pastimes: comics, games and computers. It’s true that recently, Akihabara has become more touristy – we’ve got to the point where Hollywood director McG filmed a music video set there, featuring Kirsten Dunst singing, entirely without irony, 1980s power-pop paean to solitary pleasure, Turning Japanese – and also less relevant to the mainstream, looking inward to the nerdiest interests of the fanboys.
That said, this just means you have to hunt a bit harder for the genuinely interesting stuff. Both can be found in Super Potato, a shop devoted to retro video games. It’s difficult to find (although everything is difficult to find in Tokyo, thanks to its ludicrously complex address system, and the fact that I can’t read or speak Japanese). Like many Japanese businesses, Super Potato occupies several floors of a building – but not the ground floor. The trip up the narrow, windowless staircase finds you squeezing past other Otaku, their shy eyes usually hidden behind big, black-framed glasses, backs pressed to walls lined with posters for old Final Fantasy games.
The shop looks like a university library, thanks to its cabbage-grey vinyl flooring, buzzing strip lights and the fact it’s dominated by floor-to-ceiling shelves. These are all filled with old games, all neatly wrapped in cellophane, and many are boxed and look brand new. To a lifelong gamer, it presents the feeling of being transported back in time to the early 1990s, when 8-bit graphics were realistic and the two button controller of the Nintendo Entertainment System (Nes) was a sophisticated input device.
I had come to Super Potato with a very specific mission, though. It’s one of the few places in the world with a working Virtual Boy, reputed by legend to be quite the worst piece of hardware Nintendo ever made. Originally introduced in 1995, it was discontinued within a year, and effectively ended the career of its inventor, Gunpei Yokoi. The fact that Yokoi created the ludicrously successful Game Boy and is credited by Mario’s Shigeru Miyamoto as refining his own approach to game design, should give you an idea of how bad a career stopping train wreck the Virtual Boy was.
What was so bad about it? Well, that was why I was in Super Potato. The Virtual Boy literally has to be seen to be believed, because it’s a 3D games console, and this brings us to the crux of this column – 3D is once again the tech industry’s obsession. This year’s CES show was dominated by 3D televisions and Avatar proved the public could take a 3D movie to their hearts. Sky is trialling sports coverage in 3D, and it’s making progress in games, too – graphics chip manufacturer Nvidia launched a method for PC gamers to see graphics in 3D, and 15 years after the Virtual Boy disaster, Nintendo has announced a new 3D console, called the 3DS.
How does this relate to Apple? While the interest of the movie studios in 3D is currently confined to the cinema, 3D film in the home is the obvious next step for the industry (if not the consumer) – and whether Apple is licensed to supply 3D movies via the iTunes Store will be a good indicator about how the studios are feeling about Apple. If it does start supplying 3D movies – and if 3D films become more widely popular – then there will be pressure on Apple to start fitting 3D screens to its laptops and portable devices.
Current 3D displays involve the use of glasses and fall mostly into two camps: those that use polarised lenses in the glasses, and those that use active shutters. Hollywood films tend to use the former; Nvidia’s 3D vision is the most notable kit using the latter.
With polarised glasses, each lens has a different polarised filter, which only lets similarly polarised light through. The cinema then shows a film that comprises two polarised images, projected onto the same screen (this is the reason that, if you take your glasses off in a 3D film, you see a very fuzzy picture – it’s actually two images, intentionally misaligned); when the glasses and your brain recombine them, you see an image with ‘real’ depth.
This method works very well if you’re able to create special 3D content (something Hollywood is happy with); active shutters can help create depth with existing content, which is why Nvidia has opted for it. This requires glasses with built-in liquid crystal filters that are wirelessly synced to the computer and in Nvidia’s system, an LCD monitor running with a 120Hz refresh rate. This is precisely double that of a standard LCD screen. The liquid crystal displays in the glasses flicker on and off dozens of times a second, blocking and unblocking the lens to control what each eye sees, while the screen displays different images for each eye, resulting in the perception of depth.
We’ve tested Nvidia’s system for MacUser’s sister title, Custom PC, and in some games it’s really rather good. The problem is that as the games it works with weren’t built for 3D, you end up with niggling problems such as HUDs that are difficult to read, and the cost of the glasses and a 120Hz screen, which are expensive and yet often based on mediocre TN panels.
It doesn’t exactly sound like an experience Apple is going to be rushing to implement, does it? Can you imagine Steve Jobs standing on stage to introduce a new iMac or iPod and producing a big pair of plastic glasses from his pocket to use with it?
Let’s return to the Virtual Boy, because it exemplifies everything that’s wrong with 3D, problems Nintendo must have fixed to want to return to 3D. The Virtual Boy looks like a discarded prop from The Lawnmower Man, a giant, bright red visor resting on a wiry tripod, with a standard game controller underneath. You need to press your eyes up against it, sealing off your peripheral vision. Inside the darkness, everything is bright red – the Virtual Boy uses two motorised, monochrome LED displays, and they move across your field of view to create a 3D image.
It’s a uniquely horrible experience. 3D has always been an attempt to create a more realistic view of the world on a flat screen, and the Virtual Boy’s weird, red-and-black graphics are exacerbated by the solitary experience created by having a sealed screen clamped to your face.
The fact Nintendo is going for 3D implies it’s found a method it thinks can be comfortable for the mainstream – that is social and without clunky glasses – and early indications are it’s either clever camera trickery or an autostereoscopic screen from Sharp (or a combination of both). You can see the former in effect in a Japanese Nintendo DSi game called Rittai Kakushi e Attakoreda, which uses the DSi’s player-facing camera to track the position of your eyes to give the image depth. The video is amazing, you can see it here: tinyurl.com/macuser3d.
Autostereoscopic screens work in much the same way as stereoscopic 3D only without using glasses with polarised lenses. Instead, they use a parallax barrier, a layer of material placed on the screen with angled slits that sends slightly different visuals to each eye of a correctly situated viewer.
Both of these methods are significantly more elegant and appealing than the 3D being touted by the rest of the industry – and as such, much more likely candidates for inclusion in an Apple product. The fact that Nintendo is using one (or both) in a portable gaming device whose main rival is the iPod touch only makes it all the more likely Apple will be paying close attention.
