Through the 3D stereoscopic looking glass

These televisions are 120Hz, but Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 only put out 60Hz. You have to run your game at full HD - it has to be 1080p - and it has to run at 60 frames-per-second and you have to send a double image, so render everything twice. How many games do you know that run at 1080p at 60 frames-per-second?

Right: everybody knows WipEout HD. So you have to render it twice as fast as that to get it working. So that's why people said the computers are just not powerful enough. And I can't deny it's not difficult, and that's why our game is more simplistic than Call of Duty. It is a smaller game, and we did that deliberately to make sure that it works. We've learned a lot of tricks along the way, and now we're pretty confident we can do anything.

Actually... It doesn't matter how big the universe is, it's all about view distance and the amount you can render. So Call of Duty would actually be really difficult because you've got long view distance with realistic graphics. But a CG movie would work quite well, within reason. You could actually render those sort of things quite nicely.

Yeah. And we're now licensing our engine so we are going up against the Unreals and Cryteks of this world.

No, ours is a full games engine. We've written lots of games over 10 or so years on this engine and we've written them on multi-platforms. Our technology works on the Wii and on the PlayStation 3 and on the Xbox 360.

But the point is that the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 were capable of 3D and we believe that when somebody said to us, "It's not possible to render 3D on these TVs because you need a really fast rendering engine," we thought, "Well, BlitzTech has the fastest rendering engine in the industry," so if anyone can do it, we thought we can do it. That's kind of why we decided to do it, because we thought we stand a chance at it. And actually, through doing it, we've optimised and optimised and optimised, and our engine is so bloody fast now, and that's why we feel it's quite exciting.

That's not the key feature. I mean the key feature is that it's probably a more powerful engine than Unreal. You have to see the games we've created on it. You have to be careful what you print next - I don't want to fall out with Mark Rein or anyone - but we do like-for-like and we have had independent developers looking at it and being very, very impressed. And if you look at our games, they run in 60 frames-per-second. How many Unreal games run in 60 frames-per-second?

That's the big question; that is the big question. It's going to be slow; it's going to be really, really slow. But when we started looking into this and I started talking to TV manufacturers they said it's really difficult to sell [3D televisions] because there's no content that people can see. Nobody knows that they're available. You can actually buy a Samsung plasma 3D on the high street today in Britain. But you wouldn't know it and the shops wouldn't tell you, because somebody might go, "Prove it!"

There's different ways that they're tackling it. Some use polarisation and that is significantly more costly. It's exactly the same as cinema - you can actually use the glasses that you get from the cinema on your TV. They are significantly more expensive but they are beautiful TVs, and if it hadn't broken I'd have one here to show you.

The other technology is just having a double refresh rate and synchronising with 3D glasses. That's not much more expensive for the TVs go to 120Hz because they give you a smoother picture anyway, so it's a little bit more tech but it gives you two side effects: in 2D it gives you a smoother picture, and you've got 3D. So it will be built in, but they're going to put it on the high-end and they will charge a bit of a premium, just because they can. But it's not significantly more expensive.

For mass, I think, yes.

I don't know when the next console generation is - you can't ask me things like that! No idea, and I wouldn't tell you if I did! [laughs]

The point is, we're going to spend the next few years with people waking up to [3D]. There are people now who might be interested that can now actually get a product off the shelf - or download - and try it out and go, "Bloody hell, that is actually pretty cool." If I put a website up to explain 3DTV, nobody would even look at the website. But if they download [Invincible Tiger], play the game and ask, "What is all this 3D stuff it's talking about?" They'll look at it and it will say, "If you have a 3D-ready TV then you can do this. Check this website and it lists all the TVs that will work." So people will start to go in shops soon and ask for 3DTVs, which will be quite funny.