Animated Travels

AnimfxNZ 3-D panel - EA's Habib Zargarpour (l to r), Adlabs/Reliance India's Patrick von Sychowski, 3ality Digital's Steve Schklair, and SohoNet's Dave Scammell.

One of the hot topics at AnimfxNZ was 3-D stereo and digital cinema. Dave Scammell, the President of SohoNet, ran a panel on the issue with Steve Schklair from 3ality Digital, Patrick von Sychowski from Adlabs/Reliance India, and Habib Zargarpour from Electronic Arts Los Angeles.

It’s obvious that the move towards 3-D is slow and painful. Patrick has been in digital cinema for 10 years, and says 3-D is one of those developments that’s always five years away. It’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem — stereoscopic 3-D in cinema is a function of the theaters’ conversion from 35 mm cinema to digital cinema. He likens the changeover process to the process of switching from left-hand drive to right-hand drive.

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Tim Willits

Kaila Colbin reports from AnimfxNZ.

Tim Willits is the Creative Director at id Software, where he’s been since 1995. One of the interesting things in the gaming industry is how so many of their issues predate identical issues in other arenas.

One example is the current UGC / open source / community ownership explosion online, which is having a dramatic impact on music, film, and television. id has always allowed people to modify their games, which has the added benefit of allowing them to identify skilled and passionate talent. All of the designers they’ve got in software now are from the community; young people out of college with no experience can download games, make changes, add levels, create new art, and use that for their resumes to get into the industry.

id Software has made some incredible contributions to gaming and the broader world of technology. Their game Doom legitimized the shareware / demo model, where a portion of a game gets distributed for free and then people have to pay to get more involved. Quake was the first 3D action game and the first server model game: the precursor to online social communities.

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Joseph Olin

Kaila Colbin reports from AnimfxNZ.

Joseph Olin is the President of the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences. Just like that Other Academy, on which it’s modeled, the AIAS exists to recognize and reward outstanding accomplishments in video games. The Academy is 12 years old, has 15,000 members, and acknowledges the best of the gaming best every year through the Interactive Achievement Awards.

Last year, the Game of the Year award went to Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, which also received awards for Console Game of the Year, Action Game of the Year, and Outstanding Achievement in Online Game Play. The public obviously agrees: at any given moment, approximately two million people are online playing CoD4 through Xbox Live.

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