Football in 3D

What do people think of watching football in 3D? I recently got a 3D television, so, last night thought I would try watching the Man City game in 3D. All I can say is 'odd'. I'm not sure it really works for the actual game - it confused me a little as everything was in focus, but far away. Also, the crowd looked a little 'stuck on'.

One thing that did happen, though, was that I quickly got used to the 3D effect. So much so, in fact, that when the camera panned around to the crowd, there was a guy holding up a sign. The top of this sign was cut off by the top of the screen, so I tried to duck down to read the top. I felt like an idiot!

I still haven't seen any but I really want to try it out. Sometimes when I'm watching football the ball will fly off into the air, and land somewhere completely different than I thought it was going to because it's hard to judge the angle when watching on a regular screen. Does 3D help that at all for that?

I'd go so far as to say it makes it worse. It's really hard to describe. Becuase your eyes are on a fixed focus, it removes that part of the work from the brain. You do get a sense of depth, with things closer to you actually 'feeling' closer. But, because you can't move around and see behind things, plus with the auto focus, it messes with your head.

One other thing to think about is that you lose a sense of perspective as things that are far away just appear small. You feel a bit like Father Dougall looking at the cows in Father Ted!

I haven't yet had the pleasure of warching the footy on 3D TV but have seen some of the adverts for 3D TV at the cinema which looked pretty impressive when showing footy clips. You have to wonder how much the advert resembles the actual experience you'd get when watching a live match. I often find when watching 2D the perspective is often not great especially when cameras are sited way up above the action as they are at some grounds. Quite often I feel like Father Dougal McGuire with the 'near' and 'far away' business.

Brilliant

How did you get on with the glasses, did you get used to them? I saw lots of 3D TVs at an electronics convention last year, including TVs without the need for the glasses. You had to stand in a sweet spot, which wouldn't work too well in your front room, but no doubt that would improve.  The effect of the 3D content without the glasses was very impressive though, it was almost like a hologram like you could reach out and touch the picture...

The glasses are OK. I had a Panasonic plasma for a week with active shutter type glasses, but didn't like the flickering. We took it back and got an LG passive type one. I prefer this, but the missus doesn't like the fact we've gone from 50'' to 47''. Plus, she preffered the active shutter type. Can't please everyone!

I've not seen football in 3D yet, but every film I've seen in 3D has been really cool. Even though I didn't really like the new Tron film I still enjoyed it because of how good the visuals were. Not really sure how that would transfer across to football though, but I definitely need to give it a try. Wasn't some of Wimbledon broadcast in 3D, did anyone see any of that?

Yeah, Wimbledon was in 3D. It was broadcast on the BBC HD channel. The good thing about 3D is that it can be broadcast on a normal HD channel, as it's the TV that does the decoding. I have my TV through my computer and use Mediaportal as my front end. The Panasonic was able to auto swtich to 3d mode, but the LG doesn't seem to do this with my setup. To get around this I've set up a little macro so I can switch to 3D and increase the brightness and backlight (the glasses dim the colours a bit).

I would imagine that tennis would work really well as it's all shot from a fixed distance, and there isn't much camera movement.

Your TV setup sounds impressive! Am I right in thinking Mediaportal is similar to XBMC? I used that for a while to organise my films, it was really cool.

I know what you mean about tennis, it seems like a sport that would look good in 3D, hopefully I can catch a game or two next year in 3D.

Yeah, Mediaportal is a fork of XBMC. Unfortunately it's Windows only as I prefer to run under Ubuntu. Take a look at their site at www.team-mediaportal.com. I am running beta 1.2 at the moment, but have a patch to allow me to use a sattelite dish with it. It's actually not that impressive really - other people did all the hard work writing the software.

If you are interested, my setup is this:

Core2 Duo server in the study that has 2 feeds from my dish. This runs Mediaportal tv server patched for EPG grabbing. All my noisy storage and fans are on this, as it's out of the way of the living areas.

Multiple computers in different rooms in the house and garage (check out my group on home gyms). The computer in the living room is water cooled, and I have a small solid state drive on there so it is completely free of moving parts (silent). You only need a tiny hard drive as the Mediaportal server does all the storage. This also means recordings are available from anywhere in the house.

I run the StreamedMP skin on Mediaportal, and use a Spotify plugin called Rockstar (control spotify directly from your remote). I also run the OnlineVideos plugin for iPlayer, Youtube, etc, and MovingPictures to catalogue my movies.

You can get cheap, relatively quiet Nvidia Ion based PC that would work as a client from eBuyer if you are interested in it.

Do you have a link to that PC on ebuyer? I actually considered buying an Acer Aspire Revo from there to run as an HTPC but I wasn't really sure which one to get and ended up forgetting about it. Sorry for taking this thread a bit off topic by the way!

http://www.ebuyer.com/267867-emachine-er1401-desktop-pt-nbzec-004

The price will soon add up though. That's for a base machine with NOTHING to get it going. You could install XBMC on that for free, and buy a wireless keyboard/mouse, or a remote control (the PS3 one would work if you got a cheap £5 bluetooth dongle).

The most expensive bit is getting the TV tuning working. With that box, you could get a USB DVB-T tuner, and stick an arial through it. But in order to get sky, you need DVB-S, or DVB-S2 for HD, plus a card reader. Also, if you want to use Mediaportal you will need a copy of Windows.

Sorry I only just saw this reply! Cheers for the link, I might look into getting one of those. Getting TV running through it wouldn't be a massive issues, I would mostly be using it for watching films through XBMC, and maybe getting some emulators running on there as well.

Not sure how good emulators will run on there. I have an arcade machine that I built to do that ;) - that's also in the home gym.

I've always wanted to do that! What do you have running on it?

I mostly have MAME Roms on it. I have built two. Hantarex arcade monitor, 19mm MDF, ArcadeVGA graphics card (so I can get acurate arcade refresh rates and resolutions). The joysticks are all Eurostick arcade ones on the one in my garage. The other one I built using J-sticks (like the ones found in the Model 3 arcade machines such as VirtuaTennis).

There's a video of it on my profile:

http://www.realbuzz.com/videos/play-video/867147/

Well that's officially the coolest thing I've ever seen. I'd be wanting to have megadrive and SNES ROMs as well, do you not think the ebuyer PC could handle them?

That's so cool!! New goal in life: build one of those

I'll test the machine over the weekend to see how it performs. Off the top of my head, I'd say SNES, Genesis, and all those machines should be OK. I'd even say Dreamcast would be fine, as it will use the Nvidia GFX card will take care of most of the work. MAME might be slightly different, as you want as fast a processor as possible. I am running in 64-bit mode, so it might not be that bad, but I guess it depends how modern you want the games to be.

I'll update over the weekend!

BTW, it's not that difficult to make an arcade machine. In fact, if you look on eBay, you can buy old machines that you could buy a conversion kit from. Top tip: don't use 19mm MDF for the whole cabinet - it's overkill and makes the cabinet difficult to move. Use a lower density board such as chipboard - this is what original arcade machines use.

What front-end do you use for the arcade machine? I looked into buying an old PC and turning it into an emulator box to run SNES, Megadrive etc on, but I decided to wait for a slightly cheaper option with an HDMI connection so I can run it through my TV more easily. When I was looking at doing that I thought Maximus Arcade looked pretty cool.