Tech Interview: PlayStation 3D

In terms of what the PS3 produces, it's just a video standard. It's up to the display mechanism to work out what to do with it. You could theoretically plug it into your Odeon cinema and have a game experience on that. There are some other challenges there, but theoretically you could do that. We might be sounding a bit evasive on the TV side of things but we're just generating video that can be interpreted in any way by whatever product is out there.

HDMI 1.4 should serve us for a long time. What's going to be the next big thing? Maybe more resolution but it'll be a while before a standard comes along that changes the concept of having an image for each eye.

It's a funny one really because with the cinema you've got an enormous screen a long way away from you. That can be a problem. It's certainly a problem that people like Sony Pictures overcome routinely with their movies, but it's a problem because 3D is about objects that are very close to you. And yet you're looking at it on a screen a long way away from you.

In the earlier implementations (naming no names!) it can be a recipe for discomfort because you're trying to focus on a screen that's a long way away, but you're converging on to an object that is close to you and that's not natural, whereas here with a TV screen it's much more of an intimate experience. The objects are going to be fairly close to you in depth along with the screen itself, so the converging and focusing is going to be much more natural.

So, in that sense it can be... not superior, but different to the cinema experience. You're right though, longer term, potentially, you'll get the field of view. Who knows? The simulators we used to have [at British Aerospace] had 180-degree screens and complete immersion. It is a different experience and some people find the 3D better on the television compared to the cinema and maybe easier to view. You have to make up your own mind on that one, I guess.

When I joined Evolution Studios, that was one of the reasons I joined. It's got two outputs! Connect that to two projectors and you've got 3D! It's ironic because the format that's now in PS3 is actually much more elegant and simple than that. Only one HDMI but it's producing that quality. It was a happy ending but it was a little annoying when I discovered that they'd removed that second HDMI port.

Because the likes of Avatar have been shown on this TV, third parties have been involved to some degree. But to what degree, we're not the right people to talk to. But we do talk to our internal dev support teams so all the learning we have goes out to them. But to what degree it's been rolled out to third parties or what the plans are, we don't know.

I suppose it depends on their business models really doesn't it? Sony can't force people to have 3D - they don't have that power. It's up to the public to want it, to think that looks great and buy it.

We've tried to make sure we have good coverage of genres that you can see and try out at the Sony Style stores.

One of the important messages is that we're not going to desert "2D people". I mean, I've got a 2D TV at home and still want fantastic 2D content. It's just going to depend on the take-up of 3D televisions and how much bias is given towards it. We can demonstrate the capabilities of what 3D can bring but we can't force it on people.

One thing that gives us a lot of confidence is that you look at all these numbers people come up with to project 3D penetration into the home... gamers tend to be a lot more aware of technology and the benefits it brings, like how many people bought HDTVs for the consoles rather than what was being broadcast or whatever. I think 3D will run on a similar sort of parallel. Proportionally the gamer demographic will probably have a higher take-up in the short term.

We're very interested in people's feedback. You look on the forums and you get people saying it's rubbish but for the most part they're people who haven't actually seen it.

Or they've seen internet videos where the glasses have been put in front of a camera lens...

[Laughs] Clearly it's rubbish. But we take very seriously the comments from people who've actually seen it. There's still time to tweak it and change direction to an extent based on user comments.