I've been having a little fun the last few days. Check out these shots of the Ground Effect Rev. The first shot requires Red/Cyan anaglyph 3D glasses, the kind found in 3D DVD boxes. The second requires Yellow/Blue glasses as used on UK Channel4's 3D season and possibly showing up elsewhere. Can't wait to try this version on the 3GS as my 3G obviously has issues with maintaining a decent frame rate while drawing everything twice. Still playable though...
Air Coster 3D did it ages ago and I'm not deluded enough to think it's going to be huge. I just think stereo 3D is cool and tried it out in Ground Effect because it was relatively easy to do. The effect works pretty well (those pics are grabs from the phone) and it should prove a fairly good way of soaking up extra power on the 3GS.
That's a great little experiment! Now we can all look cool walking around with our 3GS iPhones wearing blue and red glasses!
Based on my experience developing AirCoaster, stereo 3D on the iPhone is really pretty cool, and the 3GS definitely has no trouble keeping up with the frame rate. The biggest problem is, people have no idea where to get a pair of 3D glasses! They are much harder to find than you might think. I've gotten tons of 1-star reviews for this reason alone. So yeah if you want to add anaglyph 3D to your app, it's probably best to either bury the feature somewhere so that only serious users will find them or provide some way to distribute 3D glasses with the app ($$$!).
Yeah, I was worried about that. I seem to recall that Aircoaster had a 3D glasses pic on the icon at one point and was wondering why you removed it as I had been weighing up the pros and cons of adding one on my rev. I guess another big downside is that you don't want people skipping your game assuming it's a stereo 3D gimmick. I was thinking that the timing might be quite good though as a lot of DVDs are released in 3D these days so a lot of people might have them already. Searching ebay for "3d glasses" brings up huge numbers of results. I know this because I bought some Green/Magenta ones only yesterday. I'd rather not have to bury the option completely but I don't want to confuse casual browsers either. Gonna have to think about this...
The 3D Stereo mode appears, for red/cyan glasses, at 2:50. After further optimisation it runs at 30 FPS (3gs, touch 3g), 20 FPS (2g Touch) & 15 FPS (2g/3g iPhone and 1g Touch). The standard non-stereo version (also optimised) runs at 60 (3gs, touch 3g), 40 (2g Touch) & 30 (2g/3g iPhone and 1g Touch). The stereo seems to be a great way of soaking up the extra power on the fast devices. The risk of course is from one star reviews from people pointing out it's less smooth on their 3g iPhone. Potential PR minefield ahead... Subscribe to the TouchArcade YouTube channel
