Stourbridge, England. Data Design Interactive – a successful video games publisher and games developer – With the impending UK release of BATTLE RAGE: THE ROBOT WARS a third person shooter with elements of a beat’em’up game that allows a player to control giant robots. This being the first real ‘REAL 3D’ console game, by using stereoscopic glasses on the Nintendo Wii, the team behind the development taken time out of their schedule to provide an insight into the game’s 3D engine. Below, Rob Dorney Art Director and Karl White Technical Director talk about some of the main aspects of the game.

1. How is it real 3D?

KW: Most computer games are created using 3D models but the player still only sees a flat image of these on their 2DTV. Each image is flat just like a photo. You can try to imagine depth from shadows and the size of objects, but really each frame of the TV image is totally flat. In the ‘real world ‘ we see objects in real 3D, objects are solid and they appear near to us or far away. Our in-game stereoscopic render works the same way that our normal eyesight works in the real world by providing a different view to each eye, so our in-game objects appear as real 3D objects. It really does separate the game environments and characters according to their distance from the player, the effect of which is very immersive. The stereoscopic effect forces your eyes to refocus when you look around the environment, just like they would in reality.

RD: With any graphical advances like this, the effect is more pronounced in some environments than others. In BattleRage’s case, the designers took particular care to lay out the environments so there was plenty of very selectively placed items that help accentuate the 3D immersion.

2. How important will 3D gaming be?

RD: We feel there had to be a next step away from 2D control methods and 2D screen imagery- it’s been done for 20 years now. The next evolution in control has come from motion sensitive devices, the Wii remote being the primary commercial success in this field, and the next visual advance will certainly be into 3D interactive entertainment. We saw a trend forming with TV manufacturers and the movie industry starting to look into 3D and felt the video game market should also be at the forefront of this revolution. Titles like BattleRage will sow the seeds with many developers and we’re convinced there will be many other titles that try their hand at developing new 3D rendering technology, as we have.

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