I just wrote this as a comment on the Bang and Olufsen post, which had gotten into sound fidelity.
I've been a little of a high fidelity freak, both in sound and in pictures. But I'm starting to ask: is enjoying a high image quality/sharpness or an excellent sound reproduction the same as enjoying pictures or music?
Sure, there are *some* things you just can't do with pictures or music without a very high quality (fidelity) being involved. But the question is how high is the percentage of those.
I think the enjoyment of high quality is very real and laudable, but in the end it may be entirely divorced from enjoyment of art.
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Blogging about your own blog must surely be the top of the slippery slope ;-)
I aim for independence.
I've seen prints of paintings. From those prints I get a feeling for the scene the artist was trying to capture.
Take Peter Breugel's picture of kids playing, or Constable's Haywain. The picture is not lessened for the casual viewer by its reproduction, unless the colours are well off kilter.
In those images, to the mortal, brush stroke is not as important. We seldom get bang up to them (indeed if we do we see the halftone pattern of the print), and if we were up close to the picture we still wouldn't appreciate the subtlety of the individual strokes.
I know from seeing compressed images and hearing compressed audio and from using cell phones and land line that some information is lost. The impact of a big screen movie is lost on a TV set, the subtlety of a play is lost when poorly read.
Relative fidelity can have an impact, but I'm not sure that everything has to be full quality all the time.
Indeed, take that REM example, on the move we want light entertainment of music, radio quality.
Music already has to punch through the grey noise that makes up our day. Right now I can hear a fridge, the AC, two or three PC hard drives and cooling fans. Even if I had a great stereo in front of me all these sounds would be added to the music. Sure the better the source the better my enjoyment, but there is good enough.
I don't think anything can be taken in a pure sense. Even in an art gallery, there is a color to the wall behind. There are lighting conditions. There are whispered comments. There is a title. Never are we subject to a piece of art, it always is in a context.
e.g. the Mona Lisa is behind glass, behind a cordon, over the heads of dozens of tourists. Any full page art book copy is more accessible and faithful than the original.
Waffle waffle, blah blah.
Except for the last line I think that was an excellent summary.
Of course one can't listen to opera on an external speaker on a mobile phone. But my iTunes and my Soundsticks II speakers handle 99% of my needs wonderfully.
Eye (or ear) candy is pleasant, but at the end of the day, good is good and blah is blah.
I'm not getting a Playstation3, with the mandatory super-costly HDTV. I don't do network gaming anyway, so I'm totally content having endless hours of fun on my now-officially-obsolete PS2, I love to play the carefully selected good games I bought on my PS1, and at times I just plug in my prehistoric 8-bit Sega Master System for a go at some of the entertaining games I got for it. A well-designed video game is so durable, that today they are still releasing moderately graphically enhanced versions of Final Fantasy 1, the one that didn't even chance carrying a number, released on the NES-Famicom, which was slightly inferior to the Master System. I got the PS1 release of that game, and all its sequels. They're also re-editing for the new consoles such excellent PS1 classics (which I got in their day) as Final Fantasy Tactics. And I very much enjoyed the very rich and colorful Soleil, on a PS2 emulator of the 16-bit Sega Megadrive/Genesis. You have some 20 available magical animals, most of which give a power boost to your sword, and you can combine two of them for special extra powers. Like a forever-bouncing boomerang sword cast (until you call it back), or one that you can remote control. It was also stuffed to the teeth gums with secrets, I even managed to miss a few.
So basically, I'll never mind a technical quality improvement, but I'll also never forsake core quality for the visual and acoustical frills trying to conceal utter boredom. Same with music and movies: no amount of visual effects, once you're past the novelty effect of the first time like Matrix's bullet time, can make up for a hollow scenario or a bland song.
Okay, so I'm still not about to do like the typical Lebanese. Ever since I was a kid -and it hasn't changed one bit-, they marvel at the same repeated songs from Um-Kalthoom or Feyrouz, on old battered radio sets that spew more static than sound. That's the typical quaint street ambiance of arab countries...
And honestly, even if I WERE fond of those two ladies, I'd positively HATE the massacre of airing them on totally indignant devices. They were a shame in 1978, for Vishnu's sake!
I've also noticed that a good set of bud earphones can convey practically as good a sound quality as most fancy hi-fi sets. For the very simple reason, I suppose, that they don't need to drown ambient parasitic sounds by amping the volume. Earphones give both proper output acoustic power and isolation from the outside.
Having said that, I never try to enjoy music in a noisy place. Like Feyrouz's Koo-koo koo-koo or Raghib Alami's castrate whines that you hear on every public lebanese bus. Oy, vey iz mihr! After 30years, the repetitive tedious is oozing from my ears like caustic slime!
P.S.: Alex, I love waffles. If they're no too blah. ;-)
While I'm at it, I'd like to express a personal pent-up rant about video games. When came the PS1, following the very innovative Virtua games on the Megadrive/Genesis, 3-D games became commonplace. That's fine. And a good number of them bothered to make well-crafted volume and texture designs with practically no graphic glitches, like the PS1-release title Battle Arena Toshinden which still fares half-decently today. That's great. And, as the Nintendo DS proved, you can now make a lightweight console with a pair of full-color, fine image LCD screens, for a very reasonable cost. Excellent. And lastly, the PS2 can emulate the PS1, proving that it is AT LEAST 10 times more powerful, according to the rules of emulation. I'm not even mentioning the new "giant leap forward for gamingkind" that the latest consoles brought in processing power. So, here's my infuriated rant:
Ever since the dawning of the first Playstation and the Sega Saturn, I've had this dream, of a TRUE three-dimensional game. One that would recreate that fangdangled "virtual reality" which has been buzzing around even before the PS1 console was sold. So why the hell don't they use the processing power of a PS2 to make games that look as good as those of PS1, but calculating twice as many frames per second, from two nearby vantage points, sending them to the twin screens of an LCD head-mounted viewer with a resolution of 640x480 similar to that of a PS1 on TV? How awesome would that be, hunh? Is STEREOSCOPIC VISION such an unimaginable feat to envision? Or is it because Nintendo's poorly designed Virtual Boy (one of their very few failures) dived like a parabolic bomb some 13 years ago, with its two colors and flickering display?
I have a Viewmaster, with a big collection of discs, and it's not getting old any time soon. So why can't I envision to play games as good as I had on my PS1, but with stereoscopic depth? Simple answer: because "they" wanted to send us on enthusiasm orbit with their fancy, trendy, High-Def images and Full Surround sound. I don't care, guys! Helloooo? Portable consoles work just great in lo-res. And I only have two ears, so a good pair of earbuds is WAY enough to make a touble-take in the correct direction while playing Silent Hill and hearing a chilling moan.
By Hades, they could even, very easily, add motion detection and full immersiveness, by adapting the Wiimote technology. These sensors can fit in a cracker-sized GameBoy Advance cartridge like Yoshi's Universal Gravitation.
I'm boycotting the new consoles, because they tried to con me with fancy trendy tech "progress" based on raw processing power, to lazily improve the existing formula without any innovation. If I get me a new system, it'll be a Wii or a DS. To reward them for having the ballz to be creative. Even though they're the most low-tech machines on the market today, but the're designed for CORE quality.
Moody Owl has spoken. Hugh!
Pascal, don't bash at the console makers. It's the software that lags behind.
It will say though, for having tried a variety of tele-presence systems, that low resolution is a much bigger problem than you think.
The slightest incoherence between the stereo images will rapidly induce a wide variety of symptoms, from dizziness to severe headaches, along with mild to serious nausea. And that's while using cameras for the input, so imagine with computed images...
Aha. I was wondering what happened to Virtual Reality, which seemed so promising nigh twenty years ago.
Don't get me wrong, it is achievable (more and more used for military training, for example). But it requires much better gear than what I have seen on the commercial marketplace, and the software has to be done right. Unfortunately, this appears to be quite rare nowadays...
I'll bash at the console makers if it pleases me! Unlike Lebanon, the Internet is a free country, so there!
;-)
Besides, console makers are ALSO producers of software, and often produce some of the best games. The bash targets can therefore remain the same. So quit disturbing my aiming settings, okay? I've already calibrated my lightgun.
More seriously now: :-)
I must confess, I'm a little peeved right now, because in the Free the Slaves level of Lego Indiana Jones-Temple of Doom, I lost several lives in two places where the gorgeous but flat perspective was misleading. In one place I kept making a jump from the wrong place because the right floor spot looked like a wall. In the other, an elevated wall looked like it was the visible inside of a fatal gap. So this otherwise perfect game awakened my feelings of longing.
I believe that incoherences are not a sufficiently powerful argument. Not after more than 15 years (that's three generations of consoles and "giant leaps forward") of virtual reality being around; they just don't want to focus effort on it.
It's extremely easy to induce (via the hardware itself) a lag in the first processed image so the display on both screens will be synchronized, and to include a checking to prevent some polygons to be present in one camera angle and absent from the nearby one (most frequent graphical glitch incoherence, along with image lag and insufficient frame rate).
In one of my Viewmaster discs, of the X-Men cartoon series (namely, the episode "Captive Hearts"), energy blasts have a "flashing" effect created by making them of two contrasted colors, one in each image. It doesn't give me the slightest nausea.
I'm a big fan of stereograms and autostereograms. I routinely use their viewing method for easy solving of "spot the differences" games. (Especially those most annoying "count the differences" ones.) Differences also appear as if flashing (sort of), because of the mismatch, in the otherwise flat view of the combined image. The brain can adapt amazingly to some odd viewing methods. See those two animated stereoscopic examples:
A stereoscopic image which even someone lame at viewing autostereograms could see in volume. Even if you've lost one eye. That's what the brain can accomplish.
Animated autostereogram: this one requires you to be parallel-vision-able. It toesn't make me sea-sick. (Clever pun, isn't it? ;-)
I'm convinced that the dual display of a Nintendo DS, combined with the processing power of consoles that can spew 60 frames per second (when 26 is far sufficient, I've never seen a notable difference between 30fps and 60 fps), can definitely give us decent stereoscopic videogames today. At a viable market price!
"Today"... except for the small fact that it takes years to DESIGN a console, of that or any other kind. :-(
Non-stereoscopic twin-screen DVD viewer goggles have been around for years, and the only complaint I've ever heard was their price. That was before the screens of the PSP and the DS, which I don't hear gamers complain about because of their modest resolution...
Heck, since they're publishing, or sometimes revamping, many games in "glorious full 2-D", they could start by making THOSE in calculated 3-D. My Sega Master System already had some of those, but it only worked on the first version, not mine. I guess because the flicker was very marked in the 8-bit days, with a probable rate of 15 "dual" fps.
When was the last time you tried stereoscopic 3-D, Bert? And what quality was it?
P.S.: Flight simulators and GPS were also for military use at first. But I don't think it took them that long to reach the main public. Strategic considerations aside, the tech itself doesn't ned 15 years to become an affordable civilian marketing good.
OK, OK, don't let the local atmosphere get to you! Peace be with you (and bash on who you want). ;-)
As far as what kind of gear I have used, I tend to try out everything and anything I can find on store shelves, for I would love to own a decent pair of 3D goggles for experimentation purposes. Nothing so far has impressed me in any way, but I must confess that it's been a couple years since I had time to really shop around, so there may now be something out there. It may also be that usable high-end gear is simply not available in stores, but I'm not about to dish out 1K$+ on some gizmo I cannot try first.
My real experience in the field comes from some tryouts of an industrial tele-presence system, consisting of a pair of high-resolution video cameras (720p HD equivalents) and associated head tracking sensors developed by a client of mine. The goggles are LCD-based industrial equipment, I forget which brand...
I have never been comfortable with their system for two reasons. First, it is difficult to visualize small details without tightly zooming in, and that's really annoying for any real-life application. I remember developing incredible headaches from fighting this shortcoming.
The other problem lies with the head tracking device. I don't know if the problem lies in the sensor or the gimbal, or the combination of the two, but when the field of vision does not accurately track small head movements, sea-sickness hits you real fast (I'm normally not prone to this).
Perhaps all of this would be academic in a gaming environment, but I doubt it very much. I think that in fact it may be the other way around, and this would be why nobody has come out with a full-blown system yet. I would have good hope for the Wii though, because their tracking system is far better than anything I've seen before in commercial systems (see Johnny Lee's experiments, for instance).
"bash on who you want"
Ah, thank you, that's most kind and appreciated.
WILMA!? Where's my hunting club?
"My real experience in the field comes from some tryouts of an industrial tele-presence system"
Well, that's a rather decent reference. :-)
"Perhaps all of this would be academic in a gaming environment, but I doubt it very much."
If they initially do without the movement sensor application (literally a Viewmaster gaming console), it should be very envisionable. (Although every Counter Strike fanatic would sell his soul for a fully immersive VR version. D'uh!)
As a start, they could simply adapt the volume perception to the other game genres. Like RPGs, driving, FOOTBALL, and it would finally make 3D platformers practical!
I suggest, for the FPS genre, making things both simpler (for programmers) and instinctive by only displaying the aiming crosshair reticle on the right screen. Then the player could aim by closing the left eye.
And yes, from what I heard of the Wii technology, it's nothing "in your face, wha-boom!" like HDTV, but it's very high quality dedicated exclusively to gaming pleasure. They already have FPS games where you move and shoot by using the controller pretty much just like a real gun (or crossbow, in the latest Zelda spin-off). Replace the sensors surrounding the TV by still ones in the room's angles, and voilà.
Now all we have to do is hope Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft top eggheads read Eolake's blog. ;-)
As good as done. Can I pre-order mine already?
I've tried the Wii, I was not impressed. It seemed what happened on the screen had little to do with what I was doing. Like in bowling or tennis, it was nearly impossible to throw a really bad shot, even on purpose.
I agree that some of the games on the Wii target specifically non-gamers, and are thus made way too easy. Even centennial arthritis-ridden grannies (with Parkinson's) are allowed to have fun, you know. But the hardware is still capable of much much more, and the Wii paradigm is still brand new. Now that it is proven to be a hit, you probably can expect a lot more from the next generation(s).
One thing I forgot to mention about the 3D goggles is eye motion tracking. I know it is done in very high-end systems, but I have never seen or tried any such hardware. It is very possible that the discomfort I associate with 3D goggles is due in part to this shortcoming, although I wouldn't know to what extent.
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