Why we have 3d movie in 1972 but we dont have 3d video game in 1972

So i am very curious why we have 3d movie in 1972 but we dont have 3d video game in 1972
3d video game only exists until late 20th century.

Are you talking about stereoscopic games? Is the VR game industry not marketing itself enough to you?

1 Like

Stereoscopic games were being made till 2018. And are occasionally made by indies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stereoscopic_video_games

However, VR beats 3d(stereo) tvs.

That’s because “3d” tv does not account for distance between your eyes and to maintain the effect you need to keep your head at the dead center of the screen. Otherwise it will be distorted.

There’s no point in having a “3d” tv if you can have a VR helmet.

Now, if someone made a Volumetric Display or Star Trek Hologram Projector, things would be interesting. But such tech does not exist, while VR helmets are available right now.

from wiki

We barely had any video games at all in 1972.

in fact, hardly any household had a pc until 95 when the internet starting taking off. And real time graphical capabilities got a massive boost due to dedicated graphics cards driven by the boom that occurred in 95 and onwards. Still nowhere near as capable as what you are suggesting they somehow should have been able to do in real time in 1972

1 Like

I think he simply means we had 3d graphics in movies (as in CGI) but no 3d graphics games yet

OP, this is due to the nature of pre-rendering vs realtime rendering. The crappy 3D you saw in 1972 movies took a LONG time to develop (and a lot of it wasnt even really 3D CGI as such), it could never have rendered at realtime (at least 10fps) on the hardware they had.

I suggest you look up “rendering” and “baking” as a good precursor info to all this and what it entails. Looking into how the original star wars did their special effects will give you a good idea of how much “3D” really was involved, vs using miniatures and drawing over frames by hand.

1 Like

Ah, yeah, this makes more sense. Definitely the difference between pre-rendered and real-time. It blows my mind that graphics cards can now render ray-tracing in real-time now! Even though cards aren’t going to be doing Renderman shaders in real-time, it still blows my mind that it was in the late nineties when I toyed around with PovRay and PovCad, and those raytrace renderings took minutes to render a frame!

There were no 3d graphics in movies in 1972.

The first movie that extensively used 3d graphics was Tron. Released in 1982.

The first polygonal animation was made in 1972, but it was an experimental short.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAhyBfLFyNA

And making it was incredibly difficult.

There were animations even before that point. For example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYrsjc9dz30

1 Like

Well, “movie” is used pretty loosely here, I guess. I mean, movie is really short for “motion picture”, which is short for “moving picture”, which this all qualifies as. But I think you think we’re all thinking feature movie/film, to which you’d probably be right.

1 Like

At the end of the 1990’s I would play most my 3D games in actual 3D using these guys:
http://www.stereo3d.com/revelator.htm

It was awesome playing Counter Strike online on a 21" CRT in actual 3D over a modem lol. The good old days :slight_smile:

But that was part of the problem, being most 3D technology requires the viewer to wear something (even today), and being forced to wear something has its own problems. You can’t sit with a friend and have them watch unless you have extra glasses. You might have distance or viewing angle limitations. You might have annoying cords. If the user already wears glasses to see, there can be interference.

The market has spoken, and while there is definitely a fascination and “wow” factor in a 3D experience, most people don’t seem to think it is worth the drawbacks for everyday media and game consumption. You’ve seen some success at movie theaters because often you’re already going to the theater to experience the “wow” factor, so it is a good fit.

2 Likes

Cray’s first supercomputer came out in 1972. On paper it’s specs should make it capable of software rendering at playable frame rates. That said considering it cost $8 million in 1972 ($52 million in 2021) no one would likely have bought it for that reason.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-1

2 Likes

Well, they could have Elite if they really wanted to (pure wireframe without fill).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sword_of_Damocles_(virtual_reality)

That thing looked like this:

Well, I looked around and actually found a “3d” game made in 1973… “Maze War”

Here’s the hardware:

Price point is $8300 at the time of release. According to online inflation calculators it is equivalent to $50000 in 2021.

1 Like

I worked with the CTO of Linux Labs and he was telling me they got the first version of Doom running on the Cray mainframe where he worked back in those days or yore so long ago and far away.

2 Likes

Nobody had a personal computer in 1972 lmao there was no market, and hardware was primitive compared to today.

I have the old nintendo virtual boy from 1995 and it was really crude.

Stereoscopy was figured out in the 1830s and as simple as mounting 2 cameras beside each other and taking pictures or recording movies. I have one of the little wooden 3d photo viewers with copyright 1890 on the cards:

Pre rendered media has always had more they could do than real time games, but it may take 5+ minutes to render a single frame and take weeks to render a video, but once it’s rendered you can replay the video on minimal hardware.

1 Like

It can take Hours. Or days. Per frame.

Monster University took 29 hours to render a single frame.

The world record is supposedly taken by Transformer “Driller” which took 288 hours per frame to render.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformers:_Dark_of_the_Moon

1 Like

That’s wild, I do a lot of work for a company that makes content for digital signs, mostly with C4D but they branched out to Unity to make interactive content for video walls, projected experiences, and such. They’re not big enough to purchase a render farm so it takes 1+ days to transfer the terabytes of content to a render farm then a few more days to render out a couple minutes of video.

1 Like

As a 3D view fan I’m looking forward to any user friendly and accessible technique that will let people experience 3D effect of tv movies or games in their home. (Cheap, not clumsy and without eye fatique.) That technique doesn’t seem to be here not just yet, but perhaps around the corner. While waiting for that (hologram- projection- or goggles-based technique, I like to throw in some old fashioned 3D anaglyph options in my games cause it’s easy and fun. I still enjoy watching scenes from Creature from the Black Lagoon, even Disney scenes in Viewmaster, it’s kind of magic.
Screenshot of the Kinect game Astronaut Journey with option 3D Anaglyph mode.
(from Mixxus Studio - Astronaut Journey)

No. It’s not that it’s not here yet or that it’s too expensive. It’s that people have shown that they are happy with the televisions they already own. If a technology has the potential to be successful people won’t wait for the device to become affordable. You can see this in the early adoption of technologies.

VHS and DVD were successful long before they became available for $100. In fact when VHS destroyed Beta both of the devices had a price tag in excess of $1,000 USD.

3D TVs didn’t die because they were unaffordable. They died because people were happy with the technology that was already available and in their house. Cost-wise they were more expensive than a TV costs today but when you compare them to non-3D TVs of the time period they were very much affordable when they were discontinued.

1 Like

Can’t be done.

You either have a great experience and it costs, or it is cheap, and then it is awkward and poorly done.

Anaglyph stereo is cheap. It is also definition of clumsy and awkward. I mean I played anaglyph games using an NVidia extension, it is a nice gimmick, but not an amazing experience. Plus you lose all color perception.

If you want amazing experience, then you can grab a VR helmet. That will be amazing, but it won’t be cheap.

There are also google cardboard headsets where you plug in your phone into the thing (that is if you manage to find a google cardboard phone), but it is also a “clumsy” experience.

2 Likes

Don’t you believe in Star Trek Holodeck? :slight_smile: