3DO
10 messages in this thread
Hi! Has anyone ever heard about 3DO? One of my frinds said it is a device
which can render in real time. Is that true? Can anyone give me more
information about it?
Bek
3DO is a standard for multimedia entertainment, it is not a product, but more
of a venture capital magnet. It has drawn so much press that many in the
industry wonder whether its hype to reality ratio is a sign of permanent
vaporware. Panasonic was showing a 3D0 player, which is like a CD-I/CDTV clone
with some newer graphics power. This was a big draw at CES, as big as the new
Toaster even. I don't think it can render in real-time, but it can play back
video from disk almost as well as an amiga.
Hmmm… The press release we have on the 3D0 says that it will do some
shading (Gourard perhaps) in real time. They also manitain that it's
risc chip will far outperfom an Amiga. I have heard it called an
Amiga on steriods.
I've seen the 3d0 stuff at InterMedia conference at Silicon Valley
last Spring. It is a fast digital video technology; much of what I
saw looked more like a Toaster on Steroids; you can have live video
on four sides of a bouncing cube which itself is 24bit color and
bounces, squishing and stretching as it does so.
It was not at all clear where 3DO was going with all this except to
license it to others who themselves seemed unclear of what to do with
the horsepower. I'm not sure what to expect yet; there was a
"hush/hush" aura about it that could also be a sign of lack of focus
or business strategy!
I saw no examples of typical 3d redering or animation, but several toaster like
effects as I mentioned (transitions, wipes, etc…)
Probably ought to be on Unsolved Mysteries (not in production but as a SUBJECT)
Most 3DO development right now is centered on heavy duty games.
That's intersting; after all the hype are we just going to see a new
SEGA out of this technology (like I care)… Seems pretty nominal for
AT&T and friends…
Hi Bek,
Yes, it renders in real time…of a sort. There's always that tradeoff
of quality vs. speed. One of the interesting things about the 3DO
architecture is "lightning fast 24-channel bitplane
manipulation"…whatever that means! The standard demo they show is a
sphere bouncing around a room…it's said to be rendered in realtime,
not recorded…is texture-mapped, has a moving lightsource, and the
sphere deforms as it bounces into walls (which implies some physics
calculations, as well). On the downside, their polygon vertices are
quite visible…I think they may need large simple surfaces to take
best advantage of their texture mapping algorithms, but I really
don't know for sure.
Regarding the "Amiga on steroids" line: the main development team for
3DO is (and I forget their names) the same set of folks who developed
the Amiga…they're using many of the same lessons, but bringing it
to the next generation.
Tech info sounds hot, but, as Arnie says, it ain't shipping yet. I'm
more impressed by the marketing info, though…sounds like they know
how to handle that end. We'll see, huh?
I wonder if 3D0 is the virtual reality machine of the consumer?
Makes me wonder.