The Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) began Tuesday at the Los Angeles Convention Center. In stark contrast to other events such as CES, NAB or even InfoComm, there was precious little 3D on display. Easily the biggest 3D excitement was around the handheld Nintendo 3DS. Unfortunately, the line to actually see and touch the device were prohibitively long (more than an hour), so we had to settle for a picture of a non-working unit (only invited press are allowed to cut the line and we apparently didn’t make the cut). The people that did get to play with the device were limited to 20-minutes of hands-on playing time and generally said it looked great. An extra feature of the device is the inclusion of a stereo camera — the dual cameras are visible on the lid. Resolution of the cameras is VGA and the autostereoscopic display is 800×240 (400×240 per eye).

Dale Maunu
Insight Media Consultant

Sony showed their PS3 console in conjunction with their 3DTVs with a couple of titles. There seems to be only one AAA type game that supports S-3D — KILLZONE 3 — and it won’t be released until sometime in 2011. The demo at E3 was described by Sony as pre-alpha.

I asked the press relations staff at the Microsoft booth about 3D, since Sony and Nintendo were both showing 3D products. The answer was an emphatic nothing; Microsoft is focused on their Kinect motion sensor (previously called Project Natal) and their new XBOX 360 console that is supposed to eliminate the ‘Red Ring of Death’ once and for all. They were equally emphatic that Microsoft is not focused on PC gaming, only console gaming. I think that the folks at Microsoft involved with PC gaming would be surprised to learn that their PR folks don’t think much of them. It does show, however, that Microsoft is not paying much attention to the 3D happenings in the consumer electronics world.

We also saw Metro 2033 being played on a 9-view AS-3D display in the THQ booth, which actually looked pretty good. Finally, we were treated to some good, old-fashioned hucksterism. One company was showing what they called 3.5D gaming, which combined 3D gaming with a motion sensing controller — and it works with any game! What they were really showing was their controller playing a game in 2D and connected to a Samsung 3DTV using Samsung’s built-in real-time 2D-to-3D conversion feature. I am not going to promote the company doing this kind of activity by printing their name, as this was pretty cheesy way of claiming that you are in the 3D gaming business. For what it is worth, the game they showed was a driving game called Grid and, except for some funkiness in the handling of the UI, the Samsung 3DTV did a surprisingly good job of converting the content to 3D in real-time without too much lag.

3D is receiving a lot of attention in the consumer electronics space as well as movies, so we had high expectations that we would see a lot more 3D at E3 than we did. The CEO of developer/publisher EA was quoted recently as saying 3D would not be big in gaming until 2012. If E3 2010 is anything to go by, it looks like he will be correct. Please see the upcoming Large Display Report for our full coverage of E3, including more details of the Nintendo 3DS and our interview with Patrick Naud of Ubisoft about developing games for 3D.