[Wall Street Journal]
Sony is placing 3-D high on its gaming agenda. According to Mick Hocking, a vice president at Sony Computer Entertainment Europe who evangelizes and teaches 3-D to its first-party game developers, being the best at 3-D gaming has been the company’s “aim from the very start.” …
In contrast to Microsoft, but comparably to Nintendo, Sony is positioning 3D as a natural next step in gaming—a more immersive, alluring, and otherwise convincing experience. …
As developers told me, the benefits of adding 3-D to a game are significant and attractive, if somewhat coincidental—promising effects emerge in the process of building a game for 3-D and noticing which sections and gameplay styles work best. 3D is still treated politely, rather than assimilated into the family, in part because the technology is still new and being actively explored. Unlike with the Nintendo 3DS, PlayStation developers can’t guarantee that all players will have 3D equipment, so they must occupy a middle ground. …
“In some ways, making a game in 3-D is easier [than film] because it’s all virtual, and you can put the camera anywhere and sort of create 3-D content out of thin air,” says Evan Wells, co-president of Naughty Dog, the developer of Uncharted. …
“In movies they set it very carefully. A piece of scrap metal comes flying out of the screen at the audience for a ‘wow’ effect,” Hastings says. “In a freeform game context that’s harder to pull off.” Those popcorn shock effects are more disruptive to a player-directed experience, as are objects that come out of the screen but are cut off at the edges. “It looks decapitated,” Nowell says. But 3-D also conjures a childlike delight of the new and novel. …
The question no one can answer is whether the average player will actually have the gear, in the foreseeable future, to make out these horrors and illusions. Maybe they’ll remain as they are now—ghosts we hear about but spot only under particular and fortuitous conditions. “It does feel like an endpoint—it’s not something that’s horribly complicated—but I think it will offer a few interesting avenues,” Nowell says. “At the same time, you don’t want to gear yourself too much toward 3D, because then you might be writing out all the rest of your customers who only have 2D sets.”
Read the full story here: http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2011/08/24/sony-makes-its-pitch-for-a-3-d-gaming-future/?mod=google_news_blog