Market Opportunities for 3D
Arthur Berman and Dale Mannu, Insight Media
November, 2008
While some companies are commercializing 3D visualization applications with walk-in immersive rooms used for product design, the bigger market actually may be much smaller-scale: computer gaming. Spokesmen for companies on both ends of the spectrum discussed their applications at the recent 3D Biz-Ex.
The big market for 3D, according to Andrew Fear, senior product manager at NVIDIA (Santa Clara, CA; www.nvidia.com) is PC gaming. The PC gaming market is about $40B per year, indicating PC gamers spend a lot on their systems and software, making them natural candidates for 3D. NVIDIA is working with Viewsonic (Walnut, CA; www.viewsonic.com) on 3D monitors that are scheduled for Q4’08 release. These monitors will use dual link DVI, meaning they will receive dual data streams from the NVIDIA graphics card. Both of the DVI outputs of the graphics card will connect to the monitor.
NVIDIA plans to drive market acceptance by making the customer’s out-of-box experience simple. The company is writing clear instructions on how to run on the 3D mode, as well as offering rechargeable 3D glasses and an IR emitter connected to a USB port. The NVIDIA software automatically will convert more than 350 games to stereoscopic 3D without special patches or OS changes. The software also supports Microsoft DirectX 10.
NVIDIA also sees potential in home theater. According to ABI Research (New York, NY; www.abiresearch.com), there will be 81M “media center” PCs sold in 2008, with 2.5M of them connected to an HDTV. All current NVIDIA GPUs support Blu-Ray playback, and support for stereoscopic-3D playback will be a matter of a software update only.
There are other, non-PC gaming 3D market opportunities to consider. Jeff Brum, VP of marketing and business development at Mechdyne (Marshalltown, IA; www.mechdyne.com), provided details of “Commercialized 3D Visualization Applications” with examples of his company’s turnkey visual environments. The stereo-3D technology is glasses-based and features banks of projectors for each wall, as well as the floor and ceiling.
John Deere, General Dynamics (3D Virtual Reality Carrier Deck) and Kimberly Clark (Virtual Store Design) are among the companies that have purchased these systems. Each of these deployments costs millions of dollars, but they have very specific ROIs due to savings in other areas, such as the construction of mock-ups. While several of these early adopter companies have multiple installations, Brum said the actual utilization of the environments is surprisingly low – perhaps once the novelty has worn off, or the specific project for which it was intended is over, companies struggle to incorporate such an advanced environments into their daily workflow. But this should diminish over time, as 3D becomes more pervasive and the benefits more familiar with end-users.
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