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LOS ANGELES – 3-D gaming isn't just pie-in-the-sky talk. It's already here – if you've got the right equipment.
More than 400 current PC games, including Battlefield: Bad Company 2, World of Warcraft and Borderlands, can be played in stereoscopic 3-D if you've got the necessary specialized hardware, said Phil Eisler, Nvidia's general manager of 3-D Vision.
Eisler kicked off the 3D Gaming Summit Wednesday at the Hilton Universal City Hotel here, just spitting distance from Hollywood's animation, television and movie studios – some of which are already enjoying boffo box office thanks to the success of 3-D films like Avatar and Alice in Wonderland. The summit, sponsored by a variety of tech concerns like Sony and RealD, aims to recruit the makers of game software and hardware onto Team 3-D.
"3-D glasses will become standard equipment for every gamer," Eisler predicted during his presentation. "Just like the gamepad and their mouse."
Nvidia's 3D Vision video cards, which possess the additional processing power needed to handle the doubled frames needed for stereoscopic gaming, can be paired with a growing number of specialized 3-D monitors and glasses so PC gamers can enjoy many of their favorite current games in an immersive new way, Eisler said.
He also outlined a variety of ways that existing games could be ported to 3-D using a simple, automatic process for adding a second virtual camera to the game, similar to the way movies shot in 2-D can receive a 3-D upgrade. Other, more complex procedures could give gamemakers full control over every aspect of the way their games look and play in 3-D.
Photo: Gus Mastrapa/Wired.com
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