Vestin: I, for one, find the idea compelling.
Think about it - 5.1 sound is pretty much standard now, right ? It helps immersion. S3D serves the same purpose on the graphics front.
While we're at it - have you noticed how the standalone audio hardware market is pretty much dead ? No new Sound Blasters, etc ? It has simply ran into a wall - there was nothing significant to improve. On the graphics front - we're reaching the same kind of wall. "Ambient occlusion" is the visual equivalent of extensive reverb or EAX 5 - you simply can't notice the difference while actually playing the game !
Yeah, I know you can simply say "more polygons" or "liquid physics"... Those are fun things to strive for, but not THAT groundbreaking to the experience as they may sound.
If anything, I dare say that modern games have REGRESSED in positional sound quality. Too much emphasis on 5.1/7.1.
Why do I say this? My sound setup is thus: an Auzentech X-Fi Prelude, Audio-Technica ATH-AD700, and CMSS-3D Headphone (basically a HRTF filter for surround sound effects through stereo headphones).
Older games like Thief or Battlefield 1942/Vietnam, even if they have to be wrapped with ALchemy, let me hear almost exactly where a sound is coming from, possibly to a degree of rotation, at least a rough "o'clock" position-and also above and below. Certainly more precision than satellite speakers.
Modern games, on the other hand, assume the use of 5.1/7.1 speakers and set up their sound engines around this assumption. CMSS-3D Headphone can still work to some extent, but not nearly as well as compared to older games providing coordinates in 3D space for each sound and letting the sound card drivers do the work of outputting as needed. Just Cause 2 is a key example-I can hear around me in the horizontal plane decently, with sounds coming roughly from where each satellite speaker would be if it were a real speaker setup. However, the big problem is that I have no VERTICAL audio position cues at all, which is not good if I'm trying to locate some enemy helicopters in my vicinity, out of view.
If we go all the way back to the Aureal days, A3D 2.0 supposedly traced sound waves in the game map/level geometry. EAX doesn't do that. I wonder if modern GPGPUs can be used for hardware sound wavetracing and then be output from any sound device.
In short, there IS still room for improving sound in games-especially with the recent regressions.
Back on track-S3D has been done on the PC for who knows how many years now? No, I don't mean anaglyph red/blue glasses; I'm talking shutterglasses or possibly HMDs with a display for each eye (Forte VFX-1, for starters). There might even have been some attempts with parallax barrier monitors like the 3DS uses. Only NVIDIA provided decent driver support for such things, though. (And guess who introduces their own brand of shutterglasses several years later?)
For S3D on my PC, though, I'll probably have to use shutterglasses. My monitor can easily hit 120 Hz or more on lower resolutions (gotta love those 21" aperture grille CRTs), plus the low viewing angles that parallax barrier monitors suffer from would not mix well with TrackIR usage, which by its nature requires me to look at the display from some off angles.
